


Incomplete

by astolat



Series: Witcher works [3]
Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game), Witcher 3 - Fandom
Genre: Crones of Crookback Bog, M/M, Music, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-19
Updated: 2017-01-22
Packaged: 2018-09-18 15:36:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 25,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9391280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astolat/pseuds/astolat
Summary: I had often wished for the chance to meet His Imperial Majesty, of course, but hardly under these circumstances. I’d really envisioned something more along the lines of a command performance for the court, or perhaps a ceremony of decoration as a Master of the Arts.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [Incomplete/未完待续 by astolat](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12760176) by [Iuris](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Iuris/pseuds/Iuris)



It was a joyous day beneath the heavy green boughs of late summer when the storied halls of Oxenfurt University at long last flung wide their doors again. The late King Radovid’s cruel yoke had been lifted from the city, to the laments of few—at least, the open laments—and the black sun of Nilfgaard was flying from the towers. The last of the Redanian armies had fallen back far to the north and were suing for terms of peace, which is to say, surrender, and wine flowed freely in all the taverns. Emperor Emhyr had made the city his base of operations for consolidating his grip upon the Northern Kingdoms, and thus ambitious young Nilfgaardians mingled with the scions of Northern nobles who had accepted the change of regime with more grace than perhaps courage.

I myself returned to the city as one amidst the great returning migration of flapping gowns, professors and students alike flocking back to resume our work. I had just taken up a post lecturing on epic verse—and giving the occasional evening performance by popular demand—when my dear friend Geralt of Rivia stopped into town. A contract in the north had filled his purse, but left his armor sadly in need of repairs beyond the capabilities of the usual backwoods smith. He had come to Oxenfurt accordingly. We rejoiced as always to renew our acquaintance: I embraced him as a brother and took him to my favorite tavern to stand him a drink at once.

“Geralt, my friend,” I said, as we raised our glasses, “while you are here, I hope you will do me the honor of letting me present my nephew Jerhan. He’s come to the city to take up his studies, and his mother has naturally asked me to look after him.”

Geralt, who is given to a kind of unfortunate broad humor, said, “Ordered you to stay the hell away from him, more likely,” but having amused himself with this minor sally, agreed. We set across the city to one of the taverns popular with Northern students, where I found my nephew entertaining his fellows.

I took great satisfaction in introducing my friend, not least it must be admitted because my nephew had on occasion expressed some unbecoming doubts of the veracity of some of my accounts of our adventures together. Meeting Geralt in the flesh had a most salutary effect upon his excessive skepticism. Sadly, many inexperienced youths judge by appearances. Let a man display some taste in clothing, mastery of lute and harp, and maintain elevated personal habits of grooming, and they begin to doubt his courage. By contrast, let a man be grizzled and lean as a wolf, with a hardened mien, under well-worn armor, and they at once credit him with every martial virtue, no display of same required. Not of course that there’s any martial virtue Geralt _couldn’t_ display, but it’s the principle of the thing.

At any rate, my nephew was most impressed, and eager to spend more time in the company of myself and my famous, one might even say notorious, friend. When we took our leave to find our friend Zoltan and seek his loving attentions to Geralt’s armor, Jerhan asked to accompany us. We shortly found our dwarven friend at the workshop of his kinsman, smoking a pipe together, and great was our satisfaction in the renewal of our fellowship. Zoltan and his cousin rolled out an entire cask of dwarven ale from the back of the shop, and insisted on our sharing many a toast to friends absent and long gone. When the cask ran dry, a bottle of dwarven spirits followed. I mention these facts not to _excuse_ the events that followed, but merely to illustrate the ground on which they unfolded.

When at last we departed for our beds, having left Geralt’s armor awaiting the hammer and anvil on the morrow, the streets were thin of company. However, a young Nilfgaardian man in rich and elaborate clothing, with an escort of four guards, had commanded the cleanest path in the street, and evidently considered it beneath him to shift three inches to the right to avoid bumping into my somewhat asway nephew, whose own failure to avoid him was plainly not within his own control. Poor Jerhan stumbled from the knock of their shoulders, tripped over his own feet, and fell planting his hand directly into the gutter running down the middle of the street, to the ruin of a most handsome dove-grey leather glove that he had displayed for my appreciation only the week before.

“Sirrah, you shall apologize!” Jerhan cried indignantly, when he had leapt—or at least staggered—back to his feet.

The Nilfgaardian glanced back with an expression of sneering incredulity, which he then transferred to the rest of our company—unattended by any guard beyond our own valor and martial skill—and turned away again without a word.

Inflamed by this outright rudeness, Jerhan at once planted himself in the road before the man and declared, “What is this outrage? I will have you know, sir, that I am Jerhan Pankratz Montaigne, Lord Crestain, and I demand an apology for your boorish behavior at once.”

“Captain,” the Nilfgaardian said, in tones of faint irritation, as if he beheld a speck upon his boots, “put this yokel out of my way.”

The affection of an uncle—and the pride of a Pankratz—could hardly endure witnessing this kind of treatment. “Upon my honor, you shall not speak that way to my nephew without a drubbing!” I put in, feeling more than a little indignant myself, and laying my hand upon the hilt of my sword as I came to Jerhan’s aid. “Friends, to my side!”

Naturally Zoltan and Geralt would never refuse to heed my call to arms. Both stepped forward to join us at once. It’s possible that Geralt said something more or less like “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” but the real measure of his affection and loyalty can be taken from his at once interposing his own body between ours and the blades of our foes. However, his generous honor could of course not endure unleashing his sword upon an enemy without offering them every opportunity for a graceful withdrawal. He said to the Nilfgaardian nobleman and his guards, “Forget it. Just go home,” and even offered them his back as he turned to us and said, “And _we’re_ going home too, not picking a fight in the street.”

“On the contrary,” said the Nilfgaardian, crushing this olive branch thoroughly beneath his foot. “You are going nowhere but to a whipping. Do you imagine you can escape chastisement after issuing threats to my face?”

“Is _he_ drunk, too?” Geralt said in exasperated tones, addressing the captain of the offensive young man’s guards, but the man only gazed back at him with a grim expression which made plain he was well aware of the character of the man he served.

“Watch your tongue, peasant,” the Nilfgaardian said coldly.

Geralt turned to him, his face hardened by this provocation, and said flatly, “Not peasant. _Witcher_. Now _go the fuck home_ before you get yourself into more trouble than you can handle.”

“Oh, is _that_ what you expect to happen?” the young man said. He raised his voice, “Sergeant! You there, sergeant!”

As it happened, a squadron of Nilfgaardian soldiers were at that moment marching past on patrol. Their officer turned at the young man’s call. He was an older man, of sensible mien, but of course the summons of a Nilfgaardian nobleman could not but receive his polite attention. “Sir?” he said.

The young man said, in cold tones, “You will address me as Your Highness, if you please. I am Prince Horthene.” The sergeant straightened slightly—I confess I felt a certain small chill upon my own flesh as I realized that if true, the claim meant this disdainful young jackanapes was the actual head of one of the great Houses of Nilfgaard. “You will arrest these offensive Northerners at once.”

“Wouldn’t bet on it,” Geralt said, in his laconic way, and added to the sergeant, “Volscombe, isn’t it? Met you in Velen three years back. Trust me, it’s just a drunk quarrel. We’re going.”

“You most certainly are _not_ ,” Horthene said. “You have threatened a prince of Nilfgaard with violence in the street. Do you suppose you will evade punishment with an excuse of drunkenness? Sergeant, do as I have ordered.”

The sergeant looked extremely unhappy. “Your Highness,” he said, tentatively, “this man is a master witcher, who has—”

“Who has _insulted the honor of my house_ ,” Horthene said. 

Geralt rolled his eyes. “I’ll do it a few more times at this rate.”

I winced at his tone. By now, my first heat of anger had cooled slightly. Concern for my nephew’s well-being was rising in my breast to replace it. There was a neat little alleyway just a few steps down the street, and, I happened to know, the unlocked back door of a brothel at the end of it, whose front door let out handily on the eastern square of Oxenfurt, whence no more than four minutes at a flat-out run would get us over the bridge and out of the city. I tried to subtly tug at Geralt’s sleeve, to draw his attention, but alas, his arm was out of my reach.

“How much more of this insolence do you need to witness? I will accept no further excuses for your inaction!” Horthene snapped at the sergeant.

“Your Highness,” the sergeant said a bit desperately, “His Imperial Majesty has given strict orders that quarrels of honor are forbidden in the city at present—”

“I think His Majesty will take as dim a view as do I of Northern scofflaws offering deliberate insults in the street to a member of the Imperial Senate,” Horthene said. “You will escort us to him directly, if you doubt it.”

“You’ve got to be _kidding_ me,” Geralt said.

Horthene threw a furious look at him and drew to his full height and declared to the sergeant, “I invoke my right to Imperial Audience. You will bring these men at once.”

The sergeant looked almost as wretched as I myself felt at the moment. I had often wished for the chance to meet His Imperial Majesty, of course, but hardly under these circumstances. I’d really envisioned something more along the lines of a command performance for the court, or perhaps a ceremony of decoration as a Master of the Arts. “Master Witcher—” the sergeant said to Geralt, rather miserably.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to kill your men because _he’s_ a damn moron,” Geralt said. “Let’s go. He wants to try and wake Emhyr up in the middle of the night for this, he can.”

#

The sergeant looked no happier than I felt as he brought us up the stairs of the fort of Oxenfurt, which now served as Imperial headquarters, and escorted us to an antechamber to wait for the imperial chamberlain. That gentleman had to be roused from his own bed, and entered with an expression of pursed lips and frown. I found it extremely disheartening, however, when he greeted Prince Horthene on sight with a deep formal bow, and said, “Your Gracious Highness. May I be of service?”

“You shall begin by taking the name of this man,” Horthene said, indicating the sergeant, “who has forced me to threaten to invoke the right of audience to have these churls even held. I trust _you_ will deal with the matter more effectively. They offered me insult and then violence in the street, if you can credit it: an incident compounded by this sergeant’s refusal to arrest them on my word.”

The chamberlain had straightened, and received this report with a sympathetic expression. “I am grieved to hear that any member of the Senate should have encountered any unpleasantness in the city,” he said. “I can only hope that Sergeant Volscombe has acted out of a praiseworthy desire to meet His Imperial Majesty’s expressed wishes of avoiding any public incident which might inflame spirits against the occupation. May I understand that Your Highness does _not_ intend to formally invoke the right of audience?”

“You may understand no such thing if my honor is not respected,” Horthene snapped. “I will see these dogs horsewhipped in public at once, or I will see His Majesty and be told why not.”

Geralt made a noise of exasperation, which drew the chamberlain’s gaze to him, and after a moment’s hesitation, the man said with another deep bow, “I beg you to forgive a little delay, your Highness. I shall return as soon as possible. I ask you to permit me to see you made comfortable in the meantime.” He beckoned over a pair of servants who had entered with a tray carrying a silver goblet and a bottle of wine, and another with a chair. They only served Horthene, naturally, and meanwhile the chamberlain had vanished. He was gone for nearly ten minutes, while Horthene sat drinking his wine smugly before us.

“His Imperial Majesty will receive you,” the chamberlain said, bowing, on his return.

“Seriously?” Geralt said, in what I have to say seemed like an inappropriately incredulous tone. Horthene shot him a mean, narrow-eyed look of satisfaction and disdain, then put aside his glass and swept from the room following the chamberlain. The rest of us followed. There was no alternative. The sergeant and his men were directly on our heels, and there was not a single window that could have been jumped from even in desperation. I checked them all as we passed.

We were ushered into what had likely once been the map room of the fort, lately converted into an office. A single large desk stood in the middle of the room, and a man sat behind it, writing by candlelight even as we approached. Even in the extremity of our circumstances, I could not help but devour every detail of this encounter with the most powerful man of our time, Emhyr var Emreis, the White Flame Dancing Upon The Graves Of His Enemies, the ruthless conqueror who had devoured all the kingdoms of the North in his lust for power and dominion. He was broad-shouldered and bore easily the heavy golden chain of office that was nearly his only ornament; his hair, long and black as a raven’s wing, showed as yet only the faintest touch of grey. There was nothing unusual in his garb: he wore a shirt of green linen beneath a summer mantle of dark grey, embroidered a very little with gold. Nothing unusual, of course, save that despite the lateness of the hour, he was still fully dressed and at his labors, when lesser men—even his own servants—had already sought their beds.

“My gracious lord,” Prince Horthene said, bowing deeply, as we stopped before the desk. Naturally Jerhan—poor Jerhan was looking rather sickly white at this time—and Zoltan and myself made our bows as well. Geralt did _not_ , even though I’ve _spoken_ to him time and again about this total disdain for etiquette of his, and you might have thought that in this particular situation he would have recalled at least a few words of my lectures.

The emperor put aside his pen at last and sat back in his chair regarding us, his face stern and utterly without sign that humor had ever touched it. “Well?”

“These offensive churls—” Prince Horthene began.

“I am not speaking to _you_ ,” Emhyr said flatly, and I realized with a sudden leap of hope that he was looking directly at Geralt.

“Drunken argument in the street for no damn good reason on either side,” Geralt said shortly, jerking a thumb in turn to indicate the parties. “Horthene bumped Jerhan, Jerhan took it too personally, Horthene took _that_ too personally. Sergeant tried to calm things down, but his gracious highness here decided to throw all his weight at the guy to get us here. That’s pretty much it.”

Emhyr nodded slightly. Horthene was darting a shocked gaze between them, and burst out, “My lord, you cannot mean to take the word of this wandering yokel—”

“This ‘wandering yokel’ is Geralt of Rivia,” Emhyr said. “You may have heard the name.” Horthene’s face took on quite as sickly a cast as my own had worn for the last hour or so. “That it is evidently the first time you are hearing it tonight says nothing to your credit. Sergeant Volscombe.”

“Sire!” the sergeant said, coming to stiff attention and saluting.

“I imagine there is a pillory somewhere in the town,” Emhyr said. “If not, I trust to your ingenuity. Take these two young men and chain their arms together in the market square and leave them there until tomorrow nightfall. That should provide them ample opportunity to resolve their quarrel.”

“You—you cannot do this to me!” Horthene gasped. “I am a member of the _Senate_ , I will—”

“ _Silence_ ,” Emhyr said, and the word was as cutting as a sharpened blade in the hands of a master, threatening equal destruction. Horthene’s voice died in his throat. “The next time you bring yourself to my attention in such a manner, Prince Horthene, I will deliver your head to your younger brother in a basket and advise him to consider it an object lesson in the limits of privilege to compensate for stupidity. Take them away.”

Jerhan threw an alarmed look at me as he was swept from the room along with Horthene by the sergeant and his men, who were clearly struggling to keep their faces wooden. But I could do nothing to succor him. I couldn’t even help myself. I swallowed as the emperor turned his cold and reptilian gaze upon Zoltan and myself. “Your Imperial Majesty,” I said a little tremulously, bowing again, “on behalf of my nephew, allow me to thank you for your mercy and wisdom—”

“Shut the hell up, Dandelion,” Geralt muttered, and given a glint of impatience that had appeared in the emperor’s eye, I thought possibly he might be on to something, so I stopped talking.

“Should _he_ go in the stocks as well?” Emhyr asked him. I gulped.

Geralt grimaced faintly. “I’d appreciate it if not,” he said, in what I have to say was an unjustifiably grudging tone.

Emhyr nodded. “Then go stand guard over the pillory,” he told us. “You will see to it that nothing hard or sharp is thrown, nor wastes. You will interfere in no other way, on behalf of either party.”

“Aye, Your Majesty, we’ll see to it,” Zoltan said, bowing himself. “Sorry for the whole business.”

Emhyr flicked his hand, a clear dismissal, and the chamberlain cleared his throat faintly, motioning us to the door. I have to say that I for one had not the least hesitation in beating a hasty albeit graceful retreat, but Geralt didn’t move immediately. In fact, he even _addressed_ Emhyr without invitation. “Want to just tell me about it now?”

Emhyr didn’t look up from his papers. “No.”

The chamberlain hissed, “The gentleman has been _dismissed_ ,” and was still frowning deeply as he escorted us out.

Geralt looked very little better pleased, however, and as the chamberlain brought us to the doors, he turned and demanded of the man, “So when tomorrow?”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but evidently the chamberlain did; he said very coolly, “The gentleman will present himself at the fortress in the evening no later than one hour after sundown.”

“Fine,” Geralt growled.

Then the chamberlain turned to me and added, “Your Lordship will accompany the witcher at that time as well.”

I gulped and made as graceful an assent as I could manage, then left on the heels of my noble friend, who bore a look of extreme bafflement. “What the hell does he want to see _you_ for?” he said aloud, eyeing me with what I must say was an expression of unflattering doubt.

“How did you know he wanted to see _you?_ ” I demanded in turn.

Geralt threw his arms up in an attitude that mingled irritation and resignation. “Dandelion, you think Emhyr wastes his time on drunk young idiots, whatever damn title they’ve got? He’s got a job for a witcher, and since you and your nephew gave him a handle on me, he’s _using_ it. What I don’t get is why the hell he wants _you_. Unless he’s planning to chop off your head if I say no.”

“Well, I for one can’t see why you’d refuse a request from the _emperor_ ,” I said, with some urgency. “You wouldn’t, Geralt, would you?”

“Depends on what it is,” was all my friend would answer—a little more of that broad humor I mentioned, and _very_ inappropriately placed in my opinion.

#

We spent the next day nursing our hangovers and carrying out our duty in the city marketplace. Sergeant Volscombe had fulfilled his imperial master’s orders to the letter, and Jerhan and Horthene had their left and right arms respectively chained together, passed through an armhole of the town pillory, an arrangement which permitted them to stand and move somewhat, but nevertheless exposed them to the delighted ridicule of every passerby. Geralt, yawning, leaned against a hitching post near the base of the pillory with every attitude of drowsing, but when the first boy snatched a stone from the gutter to throw, with not a beat missed he flicked it back into the boy’s stomach with the flat of his blade and told him, “No rocks. No shit. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” the cowed lad squeaked out, and disappeared into the mass of his fellows, who having overheard these dictates fanned out through the market square, begging the rotting discards of every stall. Shortly these began to fly with great abandon. I winced in regret as I saw my poor nephew in his fine clothes festooned with wilted lettuce and burst tomatoes, and longed to intervene. However, when I made an abortive move to head off one ambitious rapscallion who had dragged up an entire sack full of stinking fish scales, Geralt caught me by the collar and dragged me back.

“Don’t push your luck, unless _you_ want to be in there tomorrow,” he told me. “A little mess won’t hurt him.” I took his sensible admonition to heart.

Jerhan and Horthene had a great many words to say to one another on the subject of their quarrel, and spent much of the first hours of the day yanking each other back and forth trying to gain the most freedom to move and evade the pelting. This did not much avail them. They were very soon so thoroughly covered with rubbish that when Horthene made another insulting remark, Jerhan was able to scrape together a handful of filth off his own person and hurl it at him directly.

Horthene in outrage began to return these attacks, and even older and sedate market-goers soon began to halt to watch and laugh as the two of them began to struggle to reach ripe deposits on the pillory and near their feet in order to use them on the other. It was Jerhan who, their both having exchanged a handful of slops over the top of the frame, stared over the pillory at Horthene’s angry dripping face and suddenly burst out laughing. Horthene glared speechlessly back at him, but after a few moments, even his stiff neck proved unable to resist the absurdity of their situation, and he too started to laugh, an expression which became him a great deal more than the sulky look of violently offended pride he had worn until then.

“Honestly, though, are you mad?” Jerhan demanded. “You asked to see the _emperor!_ The conqueror of the North!”

Horthene admitted in a mutter, “I’ve never met him before. I only inherited two months ago, I haven’t been formally presented at court. I thought he’d just be—another elderly nobleman.”

Jerhan shuddered. “We’re lucky he didn’t cut off _both_ our heads.”

Horthene shuddered a bit himself, and then looked away and grudgingly said, “Sorry I knocked you down.”

“Sorry I called you sirrah,” Jerhan said, and then added, “Look out!”

They spent the rest of the afternoon doing their best to fend off the assaults of the marketplace boys together. I would like to report they had much success at this, but alas! I can do no such thing. However, when Sergeant Volscombe returned at sundown and set them loose, they had taken no permanent harm to anything but their clothing, which was a complete and sad loss. Horthene was even gracious enough to invite Jerhan to come to his own home, which was provided with a bathing chamber, to address the worst of the damage to their persons.

“Great,” Geralt said sourly, running a hand over his face as he finally straightened from his half-doze as they departed. “About where this should’ve ended twenty hours ago. Come on, Dandelion. Let’s get this over with. Zoltan, I’d appreciate it if you could get that armor fixed. Pretty sure I’m going to need it.”

“Aye, never fear,” Zoltan said. “Good luck, fellows.”

I gulped and followed Geralt back to the palace, where the chamberlain shortly delivered us back to that wide uneasy space directly before the emperor’s desk. Emhyr sat back in his chair and contemplated— _me_ , I was dismayed to realize, and with a dissatisfied expression.

“I am reasonably certain,” Emhyr said to Geralt, “that this man is a fool. However, you have in the past exerted yourself to some degree to preserve his life. As you value it, therefore, I expect you to limit his folly on this endeavor.”

Geralt was staring at him in some bafflement. “What the hell do you want _him_ to do?”

Emhyr turned to regard me. “A song has begun circulating in northern Redania in the last month or so and is spreading southward into occupied territories,” he said. “An uncomplimentary one. I rarely take much notice of such things: a few public executions stifle most performances. This one, however, has resisted the usual treatment. It seems to exert a hold upon the listener—to such an extent that I have even begun to hear my own veteran troops, men I know to be loyal, whistling the melody.”

“Oh, right, the unfinished one,” I said, and then hurriedly said, “That is, your Majesty, not that _I_ would ever perform—or have even _heard_ —”

Emhyr was frowning. “Stop. What do you mean, unfinished?”

“Well, that’s why everyone’s whistling it,” I said. “It’s a standard Geltrian short form, you see—introduction, chorus, complication, chorus, resolution. Only this song just—stops. In the middle of the complication, without ever reaching the second chorus or the resolution. So you keep trying to finish it in your head. But you don’t know the rest of the complication, so you can’t, quite.”

“You are a bard. Why does it affect ordinary men?” Emhyr said.

“That’s why I understand what’s wrong,” I said. “But everyone in the street knows the Geltrian—it’s the most popular ballad form. Virtually three quarters of the songs you’ll hear in every tavern follow the pattern. The secondary melodic line of the song is also a fairly common one, which means that most people recognize it and know how that part should keep going for the next couple of bars at least, so it makes you feel even more as though you _should_ know what the rest of the song is. The whole thing’s _designed_ to make people unable to stop whistling it. A cheap and unworthy technique, really.”

“Hm.” Emhyr studied me, still frowning. “It appears I have not chosen wrongly, after all. Is there a remedy?”

“The song needs to be performed to the end,” I said. “Once people know the whole thing, they’ll stop getting stuck. The words could be changed, of course,” I added hastily.

“Can _you_ complete the song?”

“I could try, Your Majesty, but the other half of what’s making the song so popular is that the topline is just unusual enough to stand out from most ballads. I think it would be hard for anyone to match it.”

Of course, to be honest, another significant part of the song’s success was that the lyrics were extremely effective, but I didn’t think that I’d go into that with the emperor. I felt he might have a difficult time appreciating the quite clever choices of metaphor and allusion. Also some of the highly memorable rhymes. Anyway, I was sure I could fix the _lyrics_ , if I had the whole song to work with.

“But putting out a completion that isn’t quite right—that might actually have the opposite effect, make the song get stuck in people’s heads harder,” I explained. “Like when you hear the opening bars of _The Lay of Audrian_ and you think it’s actually _Spring Lilies_ , and then you’ve got _Spring Lilies_ in your head for a week.” I hummed a bit of it to illustrate, but the impatient glint began to return, so I hastily went on, “In fact, I’d bet almost anything the rest of it is written already. I think the reason it’s so powerful is because that whole line really does have an end, we can sense it, and we just don’t know what it is. It makes you sure you’ve heard it before…” I trailed off, my voice catching in my throat.

Emhyr nodded slightly. “Very well.” He turned to Geralt again. “You will take Master Dandelion north,” he said, “and with his assistance, find me the bard who has written this song. You will acquire the full version, which Master Dandelion will perform in public—altered appropriately,” he added in dry tones, “—on your way back to Oxenfurt to report.”

“And what am I supposed to _do_ with this bard when I find him?” Geralt said in grim tones, but Emhyr shrugged.

“Offer him the choice of accompanying you to face me. If he refuses, you need not press the point. I do not hire _you_ as an executioner. His name will suffice.”

“I bet it will,” Geralt muttered, and heaved a sigh. “Fine. Come on, Dandelion.”

I started with a jerk and made my bow before I rushed after Geralt. He stalked swiftly through the halls and out of the fort into the market square. “Great,” he said in irritation. “Hunting a _song_. And unless whoever wrote this is an idiot, he’s gone completely underground. This will take months.” He sighed again deeply. “We’ll start in Roggeven, I guess.”

“No, we’re not going to Roggeven,” I said.

“Huh? Why not?” Geralt said, and then he wheeled around and grabbed the front of my doublet. “ _Dandelion_. You _knew_ about this?”

“No!” I said. “Are you kidding me? I’m not _crazy_. I hadn’t even realized until I was really _thinking_ about it—”

“Who is it?” Geralt said.

“We can’t tell him! He’ll kill her!”

He closed his eyes. “Oh, fuck me.”

“Listen, it’s all right,” I said urgently, “we’ll just go get the rest of the song. I’ll bash in some new lyrics, do a few performances— the complete song will be out there, people will quit singing the rude one, and he won’t care anymore. He said himself he doesn’t pay attention to this kind of thing, so as long as you don’t go back and demand a fee—”

“Are you kidding me? Yeah, Emhyr will quit paying attention, as soon as he’s _hanged_ whoever pulled this stunt.”

“Then we’ll tell him the bard tried to jump us and we had to kill him!”

Geralt stared at me. “You want to feed one of your bullshit stories to _Emhyr var Emreis_ ,” he said, so flatly that I confess I quailed a bit. “What happens when he asks for the name? Or were you planning to serve up some other bard who didn’t do a damn thing just to cover for your latest girlfriend?”

“She is _not_ my girlfriend,” I said, with dignity.

Geralt heaved a sigh of unbecoming skepticism. “Who is she?”

I swallowed. “Promise me you won’t tell him.”

“ _No_ ,” Geralt said, and tightened his hold on my doublet and shook me bodily, which I naturally forgave as proceeding from concern for my own welfare. “Her _name_ , Dandelion.”

I gave up, although only because I knew I could trust Geralt to guard the lady’s safety as I would myself, despite his pretense of disdain. “Isildra aep Antonius.”

Geralt frowned. “That’s not a Redanian name.”

“She’s not Redanian,” I said, despairingly. “She’s from Nilfgaard.”

“ _What?_ ”

“I don’t know why she did it!” I said.

“Because she’s got a _death wish?_ ” Geralt turned away and ran his hand over his jaw. “Dammit. If there’s anything that would piss Emhyr off even more than his enemies putting this out. He’s going to have her killed _slowly_.”

“He’s not going to find out!”

“You mean, he’s going to have her _and us_ killed slowly. Hell, no. We’re going straight back to the palace to tell him. You can ask him to show her mercy. If he’s in a good mood, maybe he’ll just cut off her head.”

“Geralt, we _can’t!_ You don’t understand!”

“I understand that she wrote a propaganda song for Redania _mocking her own emperor_ , and she should damn well have _known better_! I’m not going to let you put my neck on the line for an idiot just because she’s got nice breasts.”

“She’s sixty-two!” I yelled at him. Geralt stared at me. “She taught me the lute! You can’t hand her over to be executed! I won’t _let_ you!”

Geralt covered his face with both hands and said muffled, “Why does shit like this keep happening to me?”

I took a deep breath of relief, my heart pounding. Of course I knew Geralt would never really have _done_ it, but to be fair, it _was_ somewhat alarming to contemplate the likely reaction of the emperor to discovering all the details of the situation. “Look, it’s not that bad,” I said, feeling it my duty to restore Geralt to calm.

“ _Not that bad?_ ”

“We’ll _think_ of something!” I said. “We’ll have plenty of time on the way to Nilfgaard.”

Geralt emitted a low deep agonized groan from behind his hands. An excessively melodramatic one in _my_ opinion.

#

I hadn’t exchanged much correspondence with Isildra in the last few years, but I knew that on her retirement as a traveling musician, she had won a chair as senior lecturer in composition at the Accademia Volante in Nilfgaard proper. “She’s from the _actual city_ ,” Geralt said, almost dully. “Wait, if you haven’t talked to her in years, how do you know it’s her?”

I swallowed. “I’ve heard part of the song before. A little bit of the topline melody that’s got very complex fingering—she used it in our advanced lessons. I didn’t realize why it felt familiar until I really thought about it.” I shook my head. “You don’t understand, Geralt, she’s been working on this piece for _years_. She got the topline in a dream—she felt it was a gift from the gods. She always said she had to make it perfect before she released it. I can’t believe she used it for _this_.”

“What’s she got against Emhyr?”

“Nothing, as far as I know!” I said. “Her chair has _an imperial endowment!_ ”      

We took ship from Novigrad. Geralt spent the entire journey, I am sorry to report, in a state of enormous and ill-concealed irritation, aggravated slightly perhaps by his having to take several smallish contracts to pay for our passage. I did try to persuade him that there really are no insignificant witcher contracts, even if some of them do require spending rather more time in the city sewers than one might ideally desire.

With a fair wind at our backs, it was not quite two weeks later that we reached the port city of Baccala. We transferred our meager baggage to a riverboat going up the Alba, and arrived in the city of the golden towers the next morning. Even suffering from the greatest concern for my dear teacher’s fate, I could not fail to appreciate the glory of entering Nilfgaard Harbor through the Gate of the Sun at sunrise, with the river glowing like molten gold all around us.

Geralt only grudgingly admitted he found it impressive, but even he was completely silenced by the myriad wonders that unfolded before us as we walked up from the docks into the city center. He even agreed to wait in line so we could perform that time-honored ritual of the newcomer: standing upon the golden sun laid in the center of the Place of the Great Sun, and turning a full circle to see all the spokes of the city’s eight central avenues leading away to the monumental structures at every end: the Gate of the Sun framing the docks from whence we had come, the palace of white stone with its shining towers twined round with balconies clad in lapis and malachite, the columned portico of the imperial courts, the mighty dome of the University library, the copper-roofed great market, the gilded front gates of the Gardens of the Sun at the west, and the massive triumphal archways that marked the north and south entrances to the city. 

Geralt turned his own circle slowly, and stepped away from it with a strange expression on his face, almost bewildered. “What the hell is he even _doing_?” he muttered, almost to himself.

“Who?” I asked, wondering who he meant.

“Emhyr!” Geralt said. “Why the hell is he conquering the North? Who would give a _shit?_ ” He waved an arm almost angrily around at the city.

I confess it had never occurred to me to wonder before at the Emperor of Nilfgaard’s _motives_. He was a conqueror—he desired to rule a greater realm. I said as much, but Geralt shook his head. “Emhyr doesn’t waste his time on bullshit. What difference does it make where the lines on a map are drawn? This city doesn’t need a damn thing from the North.”

 He kept brooding the whole way to the Accademia—a highly respected establishment in the university quarter, devoted to the lyrical arts. I myself had spent half a year in study here, before my money ran out and I was forced to return to my father hat in hand. I asked a clerk at the music library the way to Isildra’s office and received in return only a frowning look. “Isildra aep Antonius?” I tried again.

“I’m afraid you will not find her here,” the clerk said, a bit coolly. “She was dismissed two months ago.”

“What? Why?” I demanded. Imperial-endowed chairs are desperately coveted because you don’t _get_ dismissed. It’s not as though the money runs out.

The clerk shrugged, and all my best efforts at persuasion—including a few coins Geralt grudgingly allowed me to advance—could not win a clear answer. “I don’t really know anything about it,” the clerk admitted— _after_ he’d taken a friendly gift of twenty florens. “The directors kept it all quite hush. She was missing her classes for months before they lowered the boom, but I never heard why.” Seeing my indignation, he did add a little guiltily, “I could get you her address, if you like. I’ve had to send her several notices of fines for books she hasn’t returned.”

I couldn’t imagine Isildra failing to return library books, much less _missing her classes_ , and the address disheartened me further: I knew enough about the city to recognize that it was a cheap and nearly dangerous neighborhood, and her apartment was number 12, meaning she had to be on quite a high floor, in a crowded building. “So she gets kicked out of her cushy Imperial post, gets mad, decides to get revenge?” Geralt said as we walked, the tone of his voice leaving no doubts of his opinion of such an act.  

“No! It’s not as though Emhyr _personally_ took away her chair!” I said. “I’m sure the emperor didn’t know anything about it. Anyway, that doesn’t explain her living in a rundown _slum_. She could pay for a place four times as expensive just performing her work in taverns.”

“Hnh,” Geralt grunted. “All that stuff about her missing classes. That unusual?”

“Of course!” I said. “That’s the one part you can’t skip out on after you’ve got a chair. You can show up to classes drunk and spend an hour having the students do fingering exercises, but you’ve got to be _there_.  Anyway, Isildra _liked_ teaching classes! I can’t understand what it could be.”

“Any chance she might’ve got started using fisstech?”

“ _Isildra?_ ”

Geralt shrugged. “If she’d hurt herself, had trouble healing—” but I was shaking my head vigorously. It passed the bounds of imagination. But what awaited me in Isildra’s chambers would do so almost as completely.

There was no attendant on the door of the building. I forestalled Geralt’s visible intention to simply knock down the door—there are a sad number of people who will resort to brute force when the least amount of finesse will do—and had him stand before me while I spent a few moments acquainting the mechanism with my trusted lockpicks. (I have an extremely unfortunate habit of locking myself out of my own rooms, which has led me to develop a certain facility with the tools of an otherwise unsavory trade.) We ascended to the fourth floor by a narrow rickety staircase, and found her apartment. No answer came to our knocking, so after another brief introduction, we stepped inside, and I halted aghast.

The entire apartment, a single room only, had been transformed into a half-baked shrine. Cheap pictures of the Great Sun had been hung on every wall, and endless circles of small folded prayers tacked around them. There were several empty liquor bottles tucked into corners around the apartment holding stubs of ritual candles. Even more distressing, Isildra’s lute was leaning _dusty_ and neglected in a corner. I touched the strings and winced at how far they were from true. She couldn’t have played it in months. Geralt meanwhile had taken one of the prayers from the wall to read it. “Well?” he said, holding it out: _Great Sun hear my prayer: let my song bring chastisement for the wicked who have tormented me._

I stared down it with a growing sense of desperation. “I’m sure there’s some explanation for this!” I blurted.

Geralt shrugged, a slight movement that had the weight of a headsman’s axe. “Seems pretty clear, Dandelion. She started drinking. Lost her job. Didn’t want to blame herself, so she had to blame somebody. Picked Emhyr.” He sighed and looked around. “If it makes you feel better, I’m pretty sure Emhyr’s not going to have a sick old woman killed because she went nuts, even if she did write a song that annoyed him. He’ll have her put in an asylum or something.”

“How is that supposed to make me _feel better?_ ” I said, my voice cracking. It was—it was _grotesque_. Every time I picked up my lute, I always heard in my head Isildra’s golden voice saying, “ _And one, and two—”_ and her gentle hand upon my shoulder with her finger lightly tapping the beat out for me. Her smiles of approval were the only ones I ever obtained as a child, or ever really wanted. My father had always only sighed over my music; he yielded when I begged for lessons, because my mother had loved to play: the lute I used had been hers. But he fell asleep and snored through anything longer than a stanza, and my sister was equally tone-deaf. Neither of them ever understood. Isildra—Isildra had understood. Music had been her _life._ And now here her lute was gathering months of dust—

“ _Wait_ ,” I said, with a sudden gasp. “Wait. I’m a fool. That’s not it. That’s not it at all.” Geralt frowned at me, and I waved my hand frantically at the lute. “She hasn’t played in _months_. That lute hasn’t been touched since _before_ she lost her job. She couldn’t have written the song in revenge.”

I grabbed for another prayer, looking for some other hints—but it was the same one, the exact same one in fact: _let my song bring chastisement for the wicked who have tormented me_ , and it was the same in all of them, over and over; there could have been a thousand of them, and I had looked at almost a hundred, finding nothing different, when the door creaked open and Isildra came in. I’d seen her only five years ago, but she looked twenty years older, her honey-and-salt hair gone almost completely white and her face thin and sagging, her bright eyes dulled. She was wearing a simple cheap black gown with the knees dusty, like she’d been praying at a temple, with a small carrysack on her arm. She halted in the doorway with a jolt at the presence of strangers and said tremulously, “I—I haven’t anything worth stealing—” and then she said, “Dandelion?”

“Yes, Isildra, it’s me,” I said, my voice breaking, and reached out to her; I took the carrysack—nothing but an apple and a small roll of bread—and gripped her hands as she stared up at me. Then she looked slowly over at Geralt, and tears welled up in her eyes.

“My song,” she whispered. “You’ve come because of the song.”

“Isildra,” I said, “Isildra, listen, let me explain—”

But even as the tears were rolling down her face, there was light coming back into her eyes, an almost ferocious light, and her hands gripped down on mine tight with all the power and strength that I remembered in her fingers as she kept staring at Geralt. “My prayer,” she said to him. “My prayer has come true. My song brought you.”

I stared over at Geralt in confusion. Granted, if you were looking for someone to chastise your enemies, Geralt would certainly be your man, but in this case—

Geralt was frowning at her, and then he slowly said, “Who made you do it?”

#

Isildra automatically insisted on our sitting down, except to sit down, first we had to help her clean off the one spare chair and the empty fruit crate that was the only other thing to sit on, both of which were thick with dust, and also the table, covered with scraps of paper and ink blots. “I’ve been mixing it myself out of ashes, I couldn’t afford anything more,” she said, rushing to wash off the surface with a rag dipped in her small bucket of water. “They say you need a thousand, and I thought I had more than that, but I lost count at some point, so I just kept on making them. I couldn’t risk it not working just because I made nine hundred ninety-nine… No, dear, you’d better take the good one, I don’t think the others will take your weight,” she added to Geralt, gently nudging him away from the crate he’d been about to perch on, as firm as to any of her students. She stopped wiping and looked around the apartment as if she was seeing it for the first time. “Oh, I _am_ sorry what a state I’ve let things get into. I simply haven’t been able to think of anything else at all. Well, I haven’t been _trying_ to, of course. The priest told me that absolute focus was necessary, too.”

“Isildra,” I said, “please, just tell us what’s going on. Who do you need help with? And even if they made you write something against Emhyr, why did you give them your _song?_ _That_ song?”

She drew a deep breath and put down the rag and sat down. “I couldn’t think of anything else to do,” she said, after a moment. “They told me they’d kill her if I tried to report them. My daughter,” she added. She smiled a little, sadly, to my stare. “Yes, my dear. I have a daughter. She was born when I was quite young—oh, the usual thing. A handsome young jongleur and I shared a tavern stage, and then a bed, and two weeks after we parted I realized he’d left me something to remember him by forever.

“I gave her to the temple. I couldn’t bear to give up my music and take some menial work just to put a roof over our heads and food on the table. But I visited when I could, and whenever I had a few spare coins, I sent them to the temple for her sake. By the time she was old enough to learn to read, I’d managed to send enough that the sisters put her in school, instead of just training her as a temple servant. She’s a priestess now—she _was_ a priestess,” Isildra’s voice broke a little. “Before they took her.”

Geralt’s face had settled into the cold hard lines I knew boded ill for those men who prey upon the weak and the defenseless; he hates them as he hates almost nothing else. “Who are they?” he said quietly, deadly low.

“I don’t know,” Isildra said. “Or rather I do know one of them, but only by face. He came to my office at the Accademia five months ago. I was teaching a class about making a song that sticks in the head—all the tricks of doing it, that sort of thing. Most of the lectures are quite dry stuff, very little practical songcrafting, so it gained a bit of attention. He asked me if I could write a song that would _really_ stick in the head—enough to make people hum it even if they didn’t want to. For instance, if it insulted a friend of theirs. Well, that was obviously malice asking, but he offered me a thousand florens, and so foolishly, greedily, I told him I could write a song that men wouldn’t be able to stop humming even if it insulted their own mother. I said I’d need to know some things about the person, of course, to write the lyrics.

“He told me to meet him the next day in the temple square around noon. I was quite happy to do so. My daughter is the junior priestess on the noon prayers. I like to go and see her work when I can. But when I watched the prayers, it wasn’t her—there was another woman, an obvious substitute who didn’t seem to know what she was doing very well, made several mistakes. I was just a bit disappointed at first—I thought oh, she’s got a cold—and then the man came and sat down at my table and said to me, you’ve noticed of course she wasn’t in the ceremony, and then—”

She stopped, her lips pressed together and her eyes bright with tears; her hands were clasped tight on the table. I wrapped my own hands over them. She took a deep breath. “Then he told me who he wanted my song to insult, and I understood at once the terrible danger I’d got myself and Miria into, and all for stupid greed.

“I couldn’t think of anything to do. What could I say? A man wanted me to write a song insulting the Emperor, and he took my daughter to make me do it. Who is he? I don’t know. Where is he? I don’t know. And as soon as _he_ found out I’d told anyone—he’d kill her in revenge. And meanwhile, the temple wasn’t going to pursue her disappearance themselves. Priestesses do run away from the temple—they meet a man and go off to be married, and no one makes a fuss about it anymore, not like the olden days; now they just pretend she died, even though they know perfectly well she didn’t. There was no one to help me. So I waited until that night, and then I went to the chapel of the Black Sun.”

I drew a breath. “Isildra!”

She shrugged. “I was afraid too. But I thought, I’d brought this on myself, on Miria, with my greed and my vanity. I thought I had to make amends for my sin before I could ask for help. The priest agreed, when I told him as much as I dared—that I’d done something selfish and greedy, and my daughter was going to be made to suffer for it. He meditated and then told me that my daughter’s innocence made the Sun more willing to look upon my plea, but I had to sacrifice whatever I valued most, besides her life. If I did that, then my prayer for aid would be heard if I made it a thousand times, with my heart fixed firmly upon it.”

Geralt was nodding, professionally, and I realized—“Your song,” I breathed out. “You sacrificed _your song_.”

“Yes,” she said, her voice wavering. “I carved my beautiful song in half, and I wrote the most scurrilous lyrics I could contrive, and I gave it to the man. But before I did, I told him I’d written an account of everything he’d done, and the best sketch of him I could have an artist in the Place do from my description, and if he killed me or my daughter, it would go to every friend and student I’d ever had. And if he didn’t let me see my daughter once a month, I’d assume she was dead, and I hadn’t anything to lose.”

Geralt grunted. “Smart.”

“He didn’t like it at all, of course,” Isildra said. “He tried to threaten me, but I told him I had put a copy out of my own reach. That’s the only reason I know that Miria’s still alive. He let me see her last four days ago.” Her face crumpled and smoothed again only with an effort. “Of course it’s only a matter of time. He’s been poking around—he’s been around the office, and at my old bank, and spoken to a few of my friends. Sooner or later he’ll realize I just made it up, and then…but I couldn’t involve anyone else. Not when I’d already brought this down on Miria.”

I squeezed her hands. “Don’t worry, Isildra,” I said fiercely. “We’ll save Miria, I promise. Whoever this foul scum and his friends are, I swear to you I won’t rest until every last one of them has paid with his life for what they’ve done to her and you.”

Geralt only sighed deeply and let his head roll back in his chair.

#

We asked Isildra a great many questions about the man and his appearance to aid in our investigation, or at least I _tried_ to, until Geralt said, “Dandelion, shut the hell up,” and asked her, “Where’d you meet your daughter?” which turned out to be in a small grove in the Gardens of the Sun, and then only asked a few questions about her shoe size. Then he nodded and said, “Don’t tell anyone we’ve been here, and don’t change your routine.”

She promised, and after giving her one last comforting hug, I followed Geralt back down the stairs. We went at once to the grove Isildra had mentioned, and Geralt made me stand outside it while he went over the ground. I had of course been privileged before now to see my friend at his work, but even so, I was skeptical. To track a large monster with sizable claws and its prey dripping blood is one thing, but to follow the days’-old trail of a single woman through the city of Nilfgaard? “What if we just waited until the next meeting?” I said. “She’ll see her again next month.”

“She hasn’t got a month,” Geralt said. “Not from Emhyr, and not from these people. We already know they’ve got eyes at the Accademia. Have to figure a couple of days at most before they hear about us showing up and asking about her.”

“You think he’ll just kill Miria? What about Isildra’s threat?” I said.

“ _He_ won’t kill Miria,” Geralt said. “His employers will. Him and Miria will turn up dead in the river, looking like a lover’s quarrel, and Isildra will be found dead of poison in her apartment, suicide after her daughter’s death. Neat and tidy.”

“Sweet Melitele,” I said, a thrill of horror running along my nerves at his laconic description. “Geralt, how can you possibly find her in all Nilfgaard?”

“This guy’s not dragging a kidnapped priestess all over the city. He’s got her close by,” Geralt said. He straightened up. “Got her footprint and his. He’s got a nail a little out of line on his right boot. Stay behind me and try not to step on anything.”

“Er, that does make it a little difficult to walk,” I pointed out.

Geralt ignored me, so focused was he upon his bloodhound’s task. He kept his eyes trained upon the ground and led us through the gardens and towards the back, until he came finally to a fence that blocked off the gardeners’ equipment. I opened the lock upon the gate and we went inside. A lone gardener was snoring in a chair, derelict in his duty, and none too pleased to see us when Geralt shook him awake. “Four days ago,” he told the man. “Man came through this way with a woman in a hood or a veil.”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” the gardener said in a furtive manner, until Geralt raised a hand and spoke, a glowing symbol forming briefly in the air before his eyes.

“No reason not to tell me,” he told the man, whose face had gone  vague.

“No reason not to tell you,” he mumbled. “Paid me a bit to let ’em through the back way, from the loading dock. Said she was married, you know. Kept her hood over her head.”

The gardener led us to the large door to the loading area where several trees and shrubs in root bags stood in a cart. The area was obviously heavily trafficked, and I despaired, but Geralt only strode to the mouth of the dock and stood looking out in either direction up and down the busy road. A large and raucous tavern with some fist fighting in the yard stood not far from us, surrounded by rough characters. Geralt nodded to himself and strode off for it at once. He insisted on our taking a room for the night in this unpleasant location—I’d rather been looking forward to staying in a civilized place for once: most respectable Nilfgaardian hostelries have _baths_ , but no. After we had left our few things in the decidedly questionable bed chamber—I left my pack perched on a chair—he further insisted on our taking a table in the crowded, smoky, and bleak taproom. I’ve performed in a wide variety of establishments, but this was the kind of inn even the most desperate busker avoided: where the clientele would sooner smash your lute over your head than let you play it.

We nursed two cheap and bitter cups of beer and Geralt ate a hearty meal—witchers can drink poison if they want to, however, so that was hardly much of an endorsement. I tried to make conversation, or even just to ask why we were devoting so much time to this one place, but Geralt only shook his head at me sternly and remained quiet, his eyes on the door. I had nearly reached the end of my patience when a man entered, dark-haired and cold of face, at once suspicious to my mind, although naturally I did not stop saying, “Can’t we at least go have dinner somewhere else?” as I did not wish to betray my sudden flash of awareness. Geralt of course realized that I had marked our target; he made no answer, but rose from the table the instant the man passed through the room, and followed him out and up the stairs. I followed a moment after, so as to draw no attention, and darting up the stairs found Geralt outside a door in the back, just as his steel blade issued hissing from its sheath.

I caught my breath and put my hand on my own blade to second him, and then he kicked in the door with a single mighty blow and rushed within. The man jerked around from a pitiable sight, a slim woman in a dark gown bound hand and foot to a chair, her hair lank and unwashed, and hopelessness writ upon her face, which was marred with bruises. My heart wrung by her appearance, I could not stop myself from rushing at once to her aid, trusting in Geralt’s skill to preserve him from the villain’s blade even without my assistance.

My trust was not misplaced: even before I had Miria’s hands untied, Geralt had struck the foul miscreant to the floor, and was looming over him with a truly savage expression. “Stay down,” he told the man softly. “Trust me, you don’t want to give me any excuses to start hurting you right now. Who’s paying you?”

The man spat on Geralt’s shoes. Geralt picked him up by the throat with one hand and then told me, “Take her to our room.”

I helped Miria stumble with me on her abused legs down the few doors to our chamber, and laid her on the bed. There was a little brandy in my flask, and a few fortifying sips brought her some relief, although knowing herself safe and in the hands of capable and determined rescuers did by far the most good. “Fear not,” I assured her. “Soon Geralt will return with the names of your persecutors, and we will deal with all of them as easily as this churl. Cowards make for easy prey,” but as I was making this speech she cried out in horror, and I barely turned and drew my blade in time to hold off a blow from a ruffian who had burst through the door with five compatriots.

Of course I could have dealt with such scum myself, but with Miria’s fragile state in mind, I did not consider it beneath me to scream loudly to alert Geralt that his assistance would be welcome whenever he found convenient. He ran into the room a moment later, sword in hand, and together we speedily dispatched the foes, with possibly more dismemberment on Geralt’s part than strictly necessary. My stomach is somewhat sensitive to the smell of entrails, which precluded me from being of as much assistance to my friend as I would have desired towards the latter half of the battle, since I was occupied in vomiting.

“Dammit,” Geralt said, wiping his sword clean with an air of irritation. “Sorry, Miria. We’ll get you out of here in a minute.”

“It’s all right,” she said hoarsely, despite her pallor. “I do the cattle sacrifices on Tuesdays.”

Geralt went and dragged over the other criminal—this fellow no longer being in any state to have escaped—and flatly told him, “Did you know these men were here keeping an eye on you? Think you weren’t next on their list? _Who are they?_ ”

#

“He was hired by a middleman himself,” Geralt said. “That man was hired by a servant from House Carillon. Figured that was enough to bring to you.”

“More than enough,” Emhyr said. His stern face didn’t change very much, but his eyes had taken on a clear cold gleam as Geralt spoke. “I am pleased.”

With this encouragement, I gathered my courage and blurted, “Please, Your Majesty, I beg you to forgive Isildra. It wasn’t her fault—”

Geralt was sighing faintly even as the emperor raised a hand to stop me. “She will be restored to her chair, and Priestess Miria raised to the third rank,” Emhyr said, filling me with relief and joy. He summoned in his chamberlain, and told him, “You will triple the witcher’s fee. I trust you will not refuse it this time,” he added to Geralt.

“No,” Geralt said, but there was a strange note in his voice, and at the door he hesitated a moment and turned to glance back at the emperor, who did not raise his head but said, “You may speak.”

Geralt said slowly, “I’ve seen the city. Went to the Place of the Sun.”

Emhyr looked up at him with a slightly raised eyebrow, a hint of inquiry touching his impassive features.

“ _Why?_ ” Geralt burst out abruptly, as if he could not bear either the question or the answer. “Why—bother? What the hell is even _here_ for you?” He gestured almost violently out the window.

I wouldn’t have known what he meant myself if I hadn’t heard him speak of it before, but Emhyr seemed to understand. He leaned back in his chair and frowned at Geralt slightly, as though he was surprised to be asked. After a moment he said, “Tell me, witcher, when you see a peaceful and prosperous village, and the next rise over a camp of hungry bandits, how long would you bargain on the peace and safety of those peasants? Perhaps some months or years, if the villagers are vigilant, if they slay many of the band. But vigilance fails. A watchman sleeps, and defenses are breached. When the North stands full of misery and violence, how long can the golden towers stand? And I would see them endure a long age of men after me, before they fall.”

He lowered his head once more to his work, a clear dismissal, and Geralt came out with me without speaking again. But there was something oddly jerky in his movements, ordinarily so full of striding purpose, and I had the strange sensation that he walked beside me almost unseeing, as if stricken by a heavy blow. We made our way to a nearby tavern on the main square of the city, where our friends had taken a table to await our return from the fortress—the best table in the place in fact, for which credit was due to Horthene, who had become fast friends with Jerhan, and had joined us on this occasion to make a rather abashed apology to Geralt.

Geralt accepted it only with a distracted air, frowning a little across the table where Horthene and Jerhan sat and talked together animatedly in a back and forth of Nilfgaardian and Common. Then he turned his head, and I followed the direction of his gaze out to the other side of the square, where construction had begun on a new palace, and the rickety market pushcarts in between had in our three weeks’ absence all been replaced with a sturdy permanent bank of wooden stalls with locking lids beautifully carved and painted with flowers.

Abruptly he stood and said flatly, “Time I got back on the Path. I’ll see you all.”

I looked up at him startled. “But you haven’t even collected your fee!” I protested.

“You pick it up for me,” he said. “Do what you want with it.”

Without another word he strode from the tavern, and from our table we watched him swing himself into the saddle and ride away over the bridge, going back to the wilderness and to the harsh and unforgiving demands of the witcher’s solitary Path. “To Geralt of Rivia,” I said to my company, raising a glass. “Long may he ride!” And we all drank together in a farewell salute.

I went the next morning as he had bade me, not wishing to appear churlish by refusing his request, and presented myself as his representative. The clerk had the substantial chest of florens waiting, but told me to wait, and a moment later the chamberlain had appeared. He frowned at me and demanded, “Where is the witcher?”

“He has already set forth again upon his road; whither, I cannot say,” I informed him loftily. “It is not in my friend’s nature to rest long while monsters yet roam the earth and menace the lives of innocents.”

The chamberlain looked dissatisfied, but Geralt would have been happy to know he did not withhold the reward. “You will inform me at once when he returns,” he said only, and I promised to do so, with the unspoken proviso that Geralt did not mind.

# # #

A year was to pass before I saw my friend again. The final terms of surrender had been signed that month in Hengfors; Redania had formally submitted and Kovir and the northern principalities had accepted vassal state status. Emhyr was now the undisputed overlord of the entire continent. Many had expressed pessimistic expectations of pillage and onerous tribute, but so far the emperor’s hand did not lie too heavily upon the North. His foremost insistence was on ensuring the success of the next harvest, and in every small village men and women were conscripted to build granaries, and channels for both irrigation and drainage, and clear the battlefields of the dead. But all could see for themselves the near benefits of these improvements, so despite the coercion of their labor, few complained very much.

Afterwards, the emperor took up residence in Oxenfurt again, and I was surprised—and a little alarmed—to be summoned to his presence the very day after he arrived. The new palace itself was not unfamiliar to me: Nilfgaardian tradition cherishes hospitality, and the houses of the greatest nobles are not left idle when their masters are gone, but used instead to offer entertainments to selected members of the public. I had been invited to several delightful cultural events on site, and once indeed had given a performance of my own, to great acclaim. But it was quite a different place with the emperor there: the martial presence of his imperial guard was only the most visible outward manifestation, but there did not seem to me a soul in the building who did not move with more purpose and haste, as if a vast and powerful animating spirit had possessed them all.

I followed Emhyr’s by-now familiar chamberlain upstairs and through a long gallery to the private quarters, which I had never seen, and was ushered into a new office plainly designed to the occupant’s specifications. Tall bookshelves lined the walls, filled with a carefully arranged reference library, and the back half of the room was a large curved window that looked out over the great expanse of the Pontar towards the distant towers of Novigrad. Emhyr sat at work behind the desk, but paused long enough to level an alarming frown at me. “You were ordered to inform us when next you saw Geralt of Rivia,” he said.

I gulped. “Yes, Your Majesty. But I haven’t! He hasn’t been back to Oxenfurt at all, I swear. In fact, I haven’t heard a word from him.” I confess, I was involuntarily glad that my words were only the complete truth. There was something about that piercing gaze that made me feel exposed as a wriggling pinned bug.

Emhyr kept frowning. “That is unfortunate. However, you have a wide mutual acquaintance. We must hope it will be of assistance.”

“A-assistance?”

“Go and find him,” Emhyr said.

“Oh,” I said, then cleared my throat and repeated myself more clearly. “Oh. Er, Your Majesty, if Geralt is engaged on a contract, for instance—”

“You will tell him he has irritated me sufficiently, and he will now cease wasting his time and my own,” Emhyr said. “I have more important things for him to do than hunt stray corpse-eaters.”

He waved a hand to dismiss me before I could inquire what those more important things might be, and I left in some dismay, wondering how I was to find a witcher roaming wild over the countryside, much less persuade an unwilling one to return with me. I had no idea even where to begin, and studied a map that evening in Zoltan’s company quite blankly.

“Mayhap he’s been wintering down south?” Zoltan suggested. “Or Dol Blathanna. He’s fond of the elven kingdom. Pretty as a picture, this time of year.”

“But surely Emhyr would _know_ ,” I said, and then the slow dreadful realization crept over me. “He’d know if Geralt were _anywhere_ in his realm,” I said hollowly. “He would’ve told his soldiers to look for him.”

“Aye, true enough.” Zoltan nodded. And to my great dismay, that left exactly one place on the map where Geralt might be—well, it left all sorts of places actually, including Ofier and Zerrikania and roaming wild in the Dragon Mountains, but only one really practical place: the Isles of Skellige.

I consider myself a cosmopolitan, a man of the world, ready to enjoy all the unique pleasures that any distant land has to offer, only I’ve never found any in Skellige. The inhabitants pride themselves on uncouth garb, violent and unpredictable outbursts, raw savagery, and badly cooked food. Their idea of a musical instrument can best be described as a dead badger with six flutes stuffed into its intestines. My very _best_ experience of the Isles was as a victim of piracy on the seas on the way to Novigrad: I was sold off the ship as a curiosity to a burly gentleman who thought he was cleverly purchasing a woman discounted on account of a mustache, and was extremely disappointed to discover—I will draw a merciful veil over the specifics of this proceeding—that not only was I male, but entirely incapable of cooking, cleaning, or sewing. However, on that occasion the hideous experience was relieved by making the intimate acquaintance of his beautiful daughter, as the gentleman did not consider it necessary to police our, shall we say, intercourse. Alas, the denouement required me to flee quite abruptly into the wilderness, although dear Amila kindly bestowed a gold bracelet upon me that permitted me to pay my passage back to the mainland and civilization.

I see no need to dwell upon the many and varied sufferings I experienced on this deeply unwanted repeat visit. Suffice to say that when I _did_ find Geralt, I was at the time hanging from my ankles over a pit of snarling wild boars, this being the latest idea of entertainment that the locals had devised, and responding appropriately to the provocation: namely, I was screaming for help as loudly as I could manage. Geralt rode up, said, “Dandelion?” incredulously, and then told my unwanted companions to get me down. “What the fuck’s it to you?” one of them said.

“Good question,” Geralt said— _more_ highly misplaced humor—but added, “Come on, leave him alone. Otherwise I’ll have to kill you all. Too nice a day to die.”

“Ah, all right, then,” the chief of my tormentors said, and swung me back over to safety before cutting the ropes to drop me unceremoniously to the ground. I have never been so grateful for bruises.

“What are you even doing here?” Geralt said, bringing me a restorative mug of horrible beer at the nearby tavern. “I thought you said you’d cut off your own head before you came back to Skellige.”

“Yes, well, that was figurative,” I said, drinking deep. “I’m pretty sure the emperor would mean it _literally_.”

Geralt stiffened. “Should’ve guessed. So what does Emhyr want me to do _this_ time?”

“Something more important than hunting corpse-eaters. I’m afraid he didn’t get more specific than that,” I said. “Oh, and he told me to tell you that you’ve irritated him. I thought you’d like that.”

He snorted. “Yeah, great.”

I was really quite invested in leaving shortly and _never coming back_ , so I added, “He’s been looking for you since the day after you left, you know. I don’t think he’s going to give up.”

“No,” Geralt said. “The one thing Emhyr doesn’t do is give up.” He sighed. “Guess there’s no point putting it off.”

“None at _all_ ,” I said emphatically.

I confess I felt reasonably accomplished when I escorted Geralt back to Oxenfurt and to the palace—I thought it was just as well to provide him with a little gentle moral support and encouragement, given his abrupt departure on the previous occasion. He stared grimly at the finished palace and squared his shoulders before we went inside. The chamberlain escorted us immediately to the emperor, who put down his pen. “Geralt, I trust this marks the end of your pointless evasion,” he said, and without further preamble reached out and took a witcher contract waiting ready upon his desk, already formally sealed, and held it out. “The construction of the imperial highway has run into difficulties in Velen. You will go and ensure that progress resumes.”

I was sorry to see that Geralt eyed the folded paper with as much wariness as though it were an outthrust blade and not what would surely be a highly remunerative contract. He even crossed his arms over his chest as though to defend himself against taking it. “I’m not an engineer or an overseer.”

“I am well informed of your capabilities. I require neither.”

Geralt paused and then said slowly, “Where’s the problem?”

“The locals refer to the place as Crookback Bog.”

“You’re trying to drive a highway _through_ Crookback Bog?” Geralt said, his arms dropping as his voice rose, incredulous. “You _do_ need an engineer if the ones you’ve got told you that was a good idea.”

“They did not,” Emhyr said. “They informed me it would cost five times as much in gold and time.”

“Then they underestimated. Crookback Bog’s not just an ordinary marsh. There’s an ancient power in that place. And it’s not a nice one.”

“Indeed,” Emhyr said. “Which is why the highway is going through, and not around.” Geralt kept staring frowningly at the emperor, who raised an eyebrow. “You doubt the decision?”

“Just not sure what you’re hoping to gain,” Geralt said slowly. “You want to pick a fight with the last Crone of Crookback, you need mages and soldiers, not workmen.”

“Mages and soldiers have gone in. And have more or less come out again, without ever meeting confrontation. A few picked off along the way merely, increasing the fear and reputation of the place.”

“So you want me to clear it out for you alone? That’s not a contract. It’s a suicide run.” 

Emhyr sighed faintly. “I have already told you what I want.”

Geralt very visibly restrained himself from a wide gesture of exasperation. “Then _do_ go around. It’s just a road.”

“Do you think so? I suggest you begin in Vizima, then, and follow the highway from there to the end. A week or two more will make little difference.” Emhyr held the contract out again, insistently, and after a final reluctant half-shake of his head, Geralt reached out and took it. “Take that to the chief of operations at the work site. Now go, and return when it is accomplished. You will accompany him,” he informed me, much to my startled dismay: I could think of no use whatsoever that I could be in a _construction site,_ in a _bog,_ that was moreover evidently menaced by some supernatural being of no minor power. 

I gulped. “Your Majesty, the new semester will begin shortly,” I began, feebly.

Emhyr paid my objections as much attention as you might imagine. “The administrators of the university will be instructed appropriately. Go.”

#

It would be hard to say which of the two of us began the journey more dispirited, Geralt or myself. We took a boat upriver to the Falls of La Valette, and from there made our way down the escarpment to southern Temeria, and found another boat to carry us the last of the distance to Vizima.

There, we found some unexpected balm for our bruised nerves. The city of the late lamented Foltest had already recovered its spirits from the conquest, as though the restored banner of the lilies had been all the bandage the wounds of war required, and I swear I had never seen the markets so busy. To my surprise and satisfaction, a large number of stalls in the central square were now tended by nonhumans, elves and dwarves, who I saw everywhere mingling freely with humans outside their old quarter under the protective eye of Nilfgaardian patrols, and even Geralt stared at one point to see a Nazarene merchant with a rock troll standing by his stall. “What’s _he_ here for?” he asked, stopping.

“Deliveries,” the merchant said, eyeing Geralt’s twin swords with some wariness. “I am the local agent for the Dacian quarry.” He gestured behind him to where I could see large slabs of beautiful marble racked neatly upon their sides, as though ready-made for any lord or rich merchant who desired to lay a new floor. “Reddy is exceedingly reliable, I assure you, master witcher, and not in the least dangerous. You can see he has his city permit in order.”

“Reddy good delivery troll,” the troll put in. “Pretty rock. Sword man want buy pretty rock? Reddy carry! Reddy carry _lots_ of rock.”

“Bet you do,” Geralt said, bemusedly, and we carried onward.

The new imperial highway led us further west a brief distance before climbing a low point of the escarpment back into Velen. The road had been carved deeply into the side of the sheer rock face, zig-zagging back and forth to maintain a merely gentle slope, with a substantial railing of metal posts joined by chains, many of them adorned with lanterns, to help keep travelers from accidental falls.

I well remembered the many irritations of the steep mountain trails to northern Temeria: Zoltan and I had once taken three days to find our way up, when we discovered the trail we were on had unceremoniously been wrecked by a rockfall, and were forced to retreat some distance and hunt out a new passage. Riding upon the smooth, well-paved highway, we reached the plateau in not quite three hours’ time, even with a brief stop at a turning-off which was marked as a scenic point, where a trough of water was provided for our horses and an enterprising young man had even established a small stall offering mugs of ale and sandwiches to travelers. The view was indeed remarkable, encompassing the stretch of the Pontar from the base of the Falls all the way over the sprawling city of Vizima and the wide fields southward. A charming metal placard engraved with helpful information had even been placed to identify the locations for unfamiliar travelers, written in Common Nord and in the Nilfgaardian dialect of the Elder Speech and, to my surprise, in an unfamiliar script Geralt somewhat baffled told me was Ofieri.

“I did meet some Ofieri merchants around Novigrad a couple of years back, but they were pretty far from home. I don’t get why anybody thinks there’s going to be enough of them here to make it worthwhile,” he said. “Unless Emhyr’s planning to conquer _them_ , next.”

He said that sourly, but when we finished the ascent, we discovered to our surprise a small market at the top that did include an Ofieri vendor. Geralt exchanged a few words of greeting with the young man in his own tongue, which won us an urgently pressed invitation to come inside his pavilion—a remarkable affair, being made entirely of wool blankets and yet somehow giving the impression of a house with solid walls—and drink several cups of delightfully refreshing mint tea. The gentleman explained to us that Nilfgaard had reduced the duties to merchants bringing foreign goods into Novigrad to almost nothing so long as they established an outpost in Velen.

“And so here you find me, that my father’s goods should reach the ladies of Novigrad more cheaply,” the young man finished, a bit glumly, “although my own stocks, as you can see, are depleted to nothing. The difficulties of replenishing goods in this remote place have proven very great. I myself only reached this place with great difficulty, and with the help of an expensive escort. We hoped that the highway would be open by this past spring! If it does not open by the end of the year, I shall have to give up and return. But all shall be as the gods will.”

 “Not if Emhyr can help it,” Geralt muttered, and downed his cup.

We spent the night in a small but comfortable tavern, newly built, before we set out across Velen in the morning. The new highway was indeed convenient, and our passage was quick, but I confess, I did not myself grasp what the emperor meant us to see in his road. Geralt however grew ever more silent as we traveled. We passed several mean villages along the way, little more than a handful of farmhouses. Many of these were some distance from the highway proper, but each one had taken quick advantage: smooth dirt roads, in some cases even cobblestoned, had been laid between each village and the highway. Impromptu signs posted at the intersections informed the passing traveler that “the best meat pies in Velen!” or “fresh roast and clean beds!” awaited them at the taverns tantalizingly visible in the distance. At one crossroads we even found a young boy offering small carved wooden tokens to travelers for a free mug of ale with their dinner, if they turned off.

“It’s good ale, too, sir!” the lad said earnestly, stretching up a hand to offer one. “My da’s secret recipe. You’ll want to buy your second, see if you don’t.”

 Geralt looked down at the lad, and though it was not even quite midday said abruptly, “I could stand a drink,” and took it from his hand. I accepted my own, and together we rode down to the little inn—scarcely more than a barn itself, which had surely been its function until recently—where the goodwife served us a simple but hearty meal of potatoes and stewed chicken, and the master’s ale indeed lived up to its advertising, freshly drawn with a pleasantly nutty flavor. An old woman knitting in the corner asked us if we cared for clean socks—she was provided with a basket of them—or had any mending that needed doing.

There were no lilies on display here, only a knitted banner of the Nilfgaardian sun, and as we ate, two sturdy young soldiers in Nilfgaardian uniforms—but with local accents—stopped in, and were provided two mugs of ale to drink free of charge. These they raised to the emperor’s health, and received a hearty second to their toast from the few other guests present. “Do you not drink with us, friends?” one of them even asked me and Geralt, less in a threatening than a mildly disappointed manner.

“His health’s fine; saw him in Oxenfurt eight days ago,” Geralt said dryly, and even though the others misunderstood him to mean merely that we had seen the emperor from a distance, this sufficed to make us an attraction of some note, and we were pressed eagerly for a detailed description of the imperial master which none of these humble folk likely would ever see. The innkeeper told me proudly that he had gone all the way to Vizima once, “Since the road were built, and sold a year of Old Nan’s work in a day, I did.”

I did my best to satisfy their questions, and being kindled by their pleasure in my descriptions, I even unslung my beloved lute, and though we had hardly intended to stop for the night so soon, so great was the clamor after I sang _Isildra’s Praise_ —I’m pleased to report that the reworked lyrics had been so successful that everyone now assumed the unfortunate original version of the song had merely been a meanspirited parody—that I offered another, and then a third. By this time the tavern had filled with what seemed like every nearby inhabitant, squeezed into all available corners of the floor, and I would have felt churlish to depart—not to mention that the innkeeper had returned the coin we had laid out for our dinner, and urgently offered us his hospitality for the night, and both supper and breakfast, if we would only remain.

I thought Geralt might have been impatient to move on, but he only shrugged a little when I proposed our accepting this handsome offer, and made no objections. I spent the rest of the evening enrapturing what I must say proved a charmingly enthusiastic audience, while he sat swathed in his cloak in a dark corner, watching the festivities with his unearthly eyes, silent.

“I’ll have to pass the word about this place,” I remarked to Geralt the next morning as we rode on. “I can think of many a worse welcome that a young troubadour might meet.”

Geralt snorted. “And you’ve met most of them.” But despite this bantering remark, his spirits seemed strangely worked upon, almost I might have said oppressed, and he spoke little the rest of the day until we crested a rise and finally saw ahead of us the large work site where the broad paving stones petered away into the lower layers of sand and thence to gravel and thence to the bare mucky roadbed reaching into the bog, with a busy host of men laboring away. “Well, we’re here,” I said to him. “I wonder what Emhyr meant. I didn’t see anything magical about the road at all.”

Geralt was still on his horse, looking down the straight shot of the road into the bog: puddles of putrid standing water visible even at this distance and a greenish miasmic fog clinging to the base of the dark trees, which barred our vision from penetrating any further into its murky depths. “When was the last time you were in Velen?” he said flatly.

“Before the second war, I suppose,” I said, casting my mind back. “I’m afraid Zoltan and I ran into a little trouble in Vizima—a minor disagreement, really, with King Foltest’s purser—and we had to make a dash for it. I don’t recall much. We were in something of a rush to get out of Temeria, to be perfectly honest. When was your last visit?” 

“After the conquest, looking for Ciri. Killed twenty-three bandits riding this same stretch of the countryside.” Geralt jerked his head back towards the highway. “Had to stop in at a lot of villages, asking questions. You told me three years later I’d spend a nice night in a tavern here listening to music with friendly locals, I’d have told you to put down whatever you were drinking.”

“Oh, well,” I said. “Naturally an imperial highway would be a boon to commerce.”

“It’s not the commerce. It’s the _hope._ There wasn’t any. But no one in _that_ village is going to be cutting off their ears for the Crones—or sending their kids down the Trail of Treats,” Geralt said softly, and I had heard enough whispered legends to allow me to imagine the horrors that had laid such a shadow on my friend’s heart. “So maybe it isn’t magic. But whatever it is, I’ll take it.”

“It does seem to have run into an obstacle, however,” I said, nodding ahead of us.

Geralt’s jaw tightened with a resolve that I knew from long experience would not be gainsaid. “Time to get it through, then,” he said, with all the determination that the emperor could have wished to inspire, and spurred his mount onward.

It was only a short while further on to the work site, where the tired and much begrimed chief of operations, one Master Adal Claussan, clambered wearily out of the drainage ditch that his morose workmen were desultorily digging, one rather small shovelful at a time. Whatever hope Geralt had found along the road, I could see no signs of it here, except when the chief saw the message and said to us, “Are we to change the course of the highway?” very eagerly. Once he had actually read it, he lifted up his hands in an attitude nearly of despair. “What good is one witcher to do?” he demanded. “We have twenty guards patrolling every night! It hasn’t helped any.”

The workmen were being snatched away at night, by ones and twos, and vanishing without trace. Patrols had not prevented the disappearances—instead now sometimes it was a member of a patrol who went missing. “And it is nonsense to say it is desertion!” the chief threw at us. “The locals are being _paid_ , and the patrols are good Nilfgaardian veterans.”

“No,” Geralt said. “It’s not desertion. You see a lot of drowners or ghouls out there?”

The chief shrugged angrily. “That sort of refuse will always be found in recently conquered lands. We have seen them all the way here, too. Each morning the monster unit went out and cleared them from our day’s path with crossbows and firebombs. But we cannot make two feet of road here!” He gestured to the drainage ditch in progress. “Do you see this? By tomorrow, it will be _gone_. The walls will have caved in. And if we cannot drain away the water, we cannot build! I could pile rock upon rock here for a year and never move from this spot. The emperor must see _reason_.”

Geralt looked down at the ditch, and then said to the man, “I’ll keep watch on it tonight, see what’s going on. Tomorrow we’ll figure out what to do.”  

Claussan waved a disgusted hand at him and stalked away.

“I will keep the watch with you, my friend,” I said firmly. I did not count the loss of a night’s sleep in such a cause, particularly as getting a night’s sleep in this vicinity seemed to be something of a hazardous occupation. “Together we shall surely divine what dark forces are at work here.” Geralt muttered something under his breath, but out of charity I chose not to hear it.

Our watch was uneventful for the most part. I may have been startled on a few occasions by flares of will-o-the-wisps in the distance, and once when the hideous visage of a drowner, or so I thought, came leering out of the muck nearby. But Geralt only sighed and reached for a small rock and hurled it into the creature’s face, which proved to be only a small floating hillock of algae and moss. We saw nothing else moving but the wary patrol who came past us several times in the night with their blades drawn and their eyes hunted.

The ditch before us was not as neatly dug as it might have been: I suppose after weeks of having their work erased, one cannot blame men for growing a little careless. But water nevertheless trickled away over the stones in the bottom steadily, until near midnight we began to hear faint spurting noises, like nothing more than the eruptions of one who has overindulged in bean soup, and bubbles of muck began to swell up through the crushed rock in the bottom of the ditch near its far end.

Very shortly the slope had been reversed, and water began to flow backwards along the channel, softening the walls. Even as we watched, they began to crumble and cave in upon themselves, until the entire structure collapsed. Geralt made no move to intervene, only nodded slightly and pushed himself standing. “Let’s go get some sleep,” he said. “Seen enough.”

“What about the disappearances?” I said, scrambling up to follow upon his heels. “Surely we should keep guard over the workers—”

Geralt swept a hand over the wide expanse of the construction site, the many tents huddled along its edges. “Can’t watch the whole thing. We’re not going to fix this with guards.”

He told the chief so in the morning, and then said bluntly, “All this shit happens in the dark for a reason. So let’s put a light on it. Start doing a night shift.”

Claussan stared at him. “My men are already exhausted and dispirited! Now you want me to make them work at _night?_ ”

“Think they’re getting a lot of sleep now?” Geralt said. “Put up a double ring of torches and bonfires. Anyone sees anything moving outside, they yell for me. Meanwhile, the day shift sleeps on the inside of the work going on—you won’t need as many tents pitched, smaller area to cover for the patrol. Sun comes up, the men trade places. Switch day and night shift after one week or two, or let the men sort themselves out. Shifts don’t have to be the same size, you just want enough men in each one to do some real work.”

Claussan was frowning by then. “Burning that many torches will cost a fortune,” he said, uncertainly. “We’ll have to bring in cartloads of firewood and pitch every day…”

“The emperor didn’t send me here to keep down the _costs_ ,” Geralt said. “He sent me here to get this road moving. So let’s do it. Also, these ditches—start digging them longer. You need them to go all the way back to outside the bog.”

“Dig them back to—but that’s absurd!” Claussan said. “There is no reason to dig them that far! We aren’t trying to drain the entire bog for farmland—”

Geralt leveled a hard unamused look at him. “Claussan, I’m guessing you’re a good engineer if you got this job. You tell me one damn _reason_ why your ditches keep filling.” Claussan paused, silenced, and Geralt nodded. “Your problem isn’t engineering. Your problem is an ancient evil piece of shit living in that bog, and the only way to get this road through is by driving it through her rotten heart. Your ditches need to be connected to solid ground, someplace beyond her reach, or she’s going to close them up.”

“But,” Claussan said, beginning to sound almost plaintive now, “but as we advance—digging them that far back—we might as well make a _canal_!”

Geralt shrugged. “So make a canal.” Master Claussan plainly required some effort to accustom himself to this new way of thinking. He bore a look of somewhat helpless confusion writ upon his face. After a moment, my friend took pity on him and gave him a gentle prodding. “Doing things the usual way isn’t working. So quit doing them that way. Give this a shot. If it doesn’t work, we’ll try something else. That’s how the emperor got you here in the first place, isn’t it? Marriages, mages,  assassinations, spies, three separate invasions—first time didn’t work, he didn’t quit and go home. He tried something else and kept coming. Foltest’s people didn’t call him _The_ _Relentless_ for nothing.”

The chief suddenly gave a snort and said, “And if he means this road to go through this thrice-cursed bog, go through it shall? Well, I mean to see my wife and children again before I die, so I suppose I had better take your advice. Very well, witcher. We will light the torches tonight, and I will send a most unreasonable requisition order to Vizima at once.”

Claussan’s fears of his men’s reluctance were not borne out at all. A great many of the men were eager as bridegrooms to remain awake and working amidst their fellows by the light of the fires, and I must imagine that it heartened them all, as it did myself, to see the lean grey wolfish figure of Geralt of Rivia pacing the outer boundaries of the torchlit ring, watchful with his silver sword in hand. I like to flatter myself that I further contributed my mite to the efforts, when after a consultation with the chief I placed myself at the end of the road and sang encouragement to the laboring men. My Nilfgaardian repertoire even expanded by several classic folk pieces after a few of the soldiers hummed me a bit of their own favorites, and with their assistance I worked out how the simple but charming works ought to go.

Everyone was even more heartened when at the blinking light of day, the roll was called, and every man answered. Chief Claussan said to his scribe, “Mark _all present and accounted for_ ,” with a barely suppressed note of joy in his voice that made plain it had been long since he had enjoyed the pleasure of making such a report. The men of the night shift gladly rolled themselves into the vacated tents of their fellows to go straightaway to sleep, and the second half of the crew fell to work with a willing heart on the second broad ditch, as wide as the roadbed itself and three times as deep, which Claussan was now having them dig all the way back out of the bog, lining the bottom with gravel topped with large flat rocks. “You shall have your canal, master witcher,” Claussan said to Geralt, “and we will dig our drainage channels to it all along the length of our way. And I will hope the emperor does not execute me when he sees the budget overruns.”

Three days and nights of digging passed, in the light of sun and bonfire, and at dawn on the fourth day, Claussen stamped his way over the well-drained ground of his fresh section of roadbed, poking it with a sharp pole, then and at last turning said to his foreman in almost ceremonial tones, “Well, Recelle, let us start laying the next stretch, I think.”

I had not conceived how swiftly a Nilfgaardian road crew could work when their way was clear. Supplies had built up for weeks by then, so there was no shortage of materials to hand: wagon cart after wagon cart full of large stones were backed up and deposited onto the roadbed, and by sunset a full quarter-mile had been piled into the ground and tamped down hard by men wielding large wooden mallets, until they could be sunk no deeper. The night shift threw themselves eagerly into the work of covering them with the next layer of large pebbles and sand, and poured the thick lime mortar over it all as the sun began to rise. When the day shift rose again, they began digging the next stretch while the concrete set.

“She’s not getting rid of _that_ any time soon,” Geralt said fiercely, looking down at the hardening layer of mortar and stones, and turned to survey the work site with an almost savage satisfaction writ upon his features. The unhealthy greenish air had retreated some distance from around the road and its sister canal, the latter already beginning to fill with clear water drained away through half a dozen ditches.

He glared at the bog with a passion so great that I found myself asking, “Will you tell me more of this Crone, as you have called her?”—an inquiry impelled by the stirrings of inspiration, wholly unlooked for until now: I had not supposed the prosaic building of a road could offer much material to a poet. Nor could I yet conceive where I would derive a climax, but Geralt’s wrath nevertheless spoke of a foe fearsome enough to deserve a song.

Geralt did not wish to speak much of his encounters with the hideous Crones of Crookback Bog, but what little he said was indeed lurid enough to wake my muse fully. I wrote the first two stanzas that same afternoon, plucking out the melody softly upon my strings while behind me Geralt slept in the last hours of sunlight, the first real rest he himself had taken since the night shifts had begun.

He roused as the sun went down, however, coming awake with the sudden swiftness of a hawk taking flight; he rolled to his feet without delay, and went out slinging his weapons to his back. “Tell the men to keep their eyes open tonight,” he told Claussan. “By now she knows you’re moving again—have to figure she’s going to try something.”

Even this grim warning made the workers and their guards alert but not terrified, in contrast to their previous state: it was plain that all of them had by now understood that among them stood a true master, one of the great among the ranks of witchers, in whose knowledge and skill they might fully repose their trust. With him at their side, the lurking horror of the bog became another enemy to be defeated, another obstacle to overcome, rather than some unearthly and invincible power. They were brave, and willing to fight, now that he had shown them the way.

It was as well that it was so, for his warning proved prophetic. The last light had barely faded from the sky when the first attack came, a wind rising from the depths of the swamp to carry the fetid air into the faces of the workmen. They began to cough and gasp for air, but Geralt called to the patrols to help him bring forward more of the heaped dry stacks of firewood from the coming days’ supply, and soon they had established a small wall of bonfires at the leading edge of the work area, which blazed green with the swamp gases, but in burning cleared them from the air.

Then one of the men screamed suddenly from the edge of the swamp as he carried forward another bundle of wood, and was jerked away bodily into the gathered mists, whence a hideous gurgling noise arose. All the men jerked in alarm, but Geralt was already in motion with that truly shocking speed that only a witcher can achieve, devouring the distance in three enormous strides and plunging silver sword in hand into the mirk after the hapless lost man. We could see nothing of him, but we heard clear the vivid susurration of his blade parting flesh, and many faint plashing noises: one hideous severed head of a drowner even came rolling out to our feet, the gross tongue swollen out and the protruding bulbous eyes clouded.

A few moments later the witcher emerged, splattered copiously with greenish blood and carrying the limp form of the workman over his shoulder; he handed the poor man over to many ready hands, and though a glance was enough to tell me there was little chance of saving the man’s life, Geralt had nevertheless saved the courage of his fellows, by proving he might snatch them out of the jaws of the beast. He said to Claussan, “Add this to your next requisition: a silver knife for every man. If they can stab a couple times if they get grabbed, make whatever got them hold back a little, it’ll make it easier to get to them in time.” And so firmly had he established his reputation among them by now that the chief did not demur even for an instant at this vastly expensive request, but nodded and at once wrote out the order.

Geralt resumed his prowling of the edges of the site, as the men bent with even more angry resolution to their task: I now felt with them that every shovel thrust into the ground became a blow struck against the invisible foe who sought to rend them, and their pace grew all the quicker. They cut the roadbed and the canal to the very foot of the sheltering bonfires, and dug another half dozen drainage channels, all in the span of that one night.

Geralt himself plunged into the fog several more times, and we heard his blade working, the sound echoing so strangely that it might have come from anywhere around us: a peculiar effect of the fog which became to us now a source of satisfaction rather than fear, making one and all alike feel as though the great witcher stood by their shoulder. He said nothing of these battles when he emerged, treating them as trivialities, though his sword dripped ichor enough for him to have slain an army of monstrosities. He merely wiped his blade clean, and honed it sharp, and oiled it again; occasionally he took a swig of water for refreshment, and twice drank from a stoppered bottle some potion that made him shake his head like a dog, and swelled his veins into visible purplish lines drawn across his face.

Another four nights passed in like fashion. The attacks varied in their nature, but the witcher’s vigilance never failed. The silver knives were delivered, and two men even managed to use them when they were snatched, and were rescued alive though wounded badly enough to be sent home with a pension for the rest of their days. The road steadily crept onward into the bog.

Towards the end of the fifth night, when the sky began to lighten in the east, Geralt came to stand upon the edge of the site: the bonfires were burning low. He stood with a listening attitude, and abruptly he sheathed his blade and took up a torch in its stead. He lit it at the bonfire and strode into the swamp. I heard him a few moments later speaking, only just too distant to make out the words, and after a sensible hesitation the demands of my muse sent me out in pursuit. I picked my way carefully amid the putrid hillocks of rotting vegetation to his side, with no more idea of whom he addressed, until at last I reached him and found him speaking with a most extraordinary creature, a little manikin scarcely above his knee and formed one might have said from the very matter of the swamp, pale-skinned with large lamp-like yellow eyes, hair like a net of weeds and branch-spindly arms and legs.

The creature gazed upon me in as much wonder as the reverse, and said, “Lord, but it’s _purple_. Never seen the like. What’s that mysterious concoction on your head?” he demanded, and when I naturally doffed my cap to allow the friendly little fellow to examine it, he was so fascinated by the velvet thing that Geralt could only with difficulty recall him to their conversation, and only after Johnny—for such was this peculiar being’s name—had tried it upon his head several times, and pulled Geralt with his torch over to a pool of water where he might examine his reflection.

 _“Johnny_ ,” Geralt said at last, growing exasperated. “Come on. You didn’t come here to try on Dandelion’s hat.”

“But an artifact of such exceptional magnificence demands the appropriate attention,” Johnny answered him, though removing it, and held it out to me with an air of such reluctance that I could not but tell him to keep it as my gift. His eyes grew still more enormous, and he breathed out, “You don’t _mean_ it, surely,” and when I assured him clutched it against himself and danced a small jig of delight before perching it once more upon his head.

Geralt sighed greatly through his transports. “ _Now_ will you talk?” he said, when at last these had settled.

“But I’ve been talking incessantly!” Johnny said, with a great deal of justice: a veritable torrent of praise had been flowing from his lips.

“To the _point_ ,” Geralt said. “Why are you here?”

The little figure finally sagged, and after a moment almost with a beseeching look said, “You’ve got to tell them to go round. She’s hopping mad already you’ve got this far. She’s not going to let the road come through.”

“Didn’t figure she would,” Geralt said. “You know anything more specific? What she’s planning to try?” Johnny said nothing, indecision and unhappiness plainly visible upon his small face, and after a moment Geralt squatted down to look the little creature in the face. “Johnny,” he said more gently.

“Roads mean men,” Johnny said. “Men with swords and crossbows, men with axes for the trees and shovels for the ground, men with fences and doors all over. No place for a godling, then.”

Geralt nodded a little. “I know,” he said quietly. “Can’t blame you if you don’t want to help us. But they’ve filled this swamp with human bones and human blood. It ends here. No more Crones, no more human children coming down the trail of treats to walk into their maw. The road’s coming for her, Johnny. One way or another.”

Johnny’s shoulders slumped a bit further, and I myself gingerly knelt down beside Geralt. “Men may also mean other things,” I suggested. “Men may come with harp and lute, book and song and velvet hats. Surely a godling of such refined tastes as yourself might yet find pleasure in their society.”

He glanced at me and said, low, “They’ll look at me and see a monster, though, and set their toothy hounds upon me.”

“Only if they know no better,” I said. “Give us your aid, and I swear in return I shall make a song of Johnny the Godling, bringer of luck to any mortal who sees him and gives him welcome, and sing it up and down the length of this highway from Vizima all the way to the towers of Novigrad, that natives and travelers alike shall know you as a friend to man, and not an enemy.”

Geralt was staring at me somewhat bemused, but wonder had illuminated the little godling’s face. “A song of Johnny!” he said, rapturous. “Why, my head will grow as big as a forest. And I shall give you matter to make it, so I shall. But,” he added, growing a little more dismal, “it’s no fit matter for a joyful song, a wondrous skipping melody to dance the heart and fingers on. She means to call them all against you, witcher, you and your stone-men, road-men. And not just monsters, neither. She’s whispering hate into every ear on her string, to all the folk who follow her. In three days’ time they’ll come to her tune, mortals all marching into the bog. Any who’ve given a little blood to the Ladies, any who’ve put hair on their shrines at their cutting; any who’ve supped at their Sabbaths or begged a favor to manage through a lean winter. She’ll block your road with the bodies who’d walk it, and you’ll build it only over their bones.”

I stiffened with alarm, hearing this threat. Geralt had told me enough of the worship of the Crones that I knew it widespread throughout this blighted and miserable land. We had a large company of men, but not enough to meet all the roused populace of the countryside for miles around, and even if more soldiers might reach us in time, summoned from Vizima on Johnny’s warning, there would be little joy in such a victory, trampling poor peasants who were themselves the victims of the foul creature we faced.

Geralt was silent himself. It would be no battle that the witcher relished, that I knew for certain. Geralt unsheathed his steel sword only at need, and often reluctantly even then; how much more so, when those before him were the very people he wished to free from their monstrous yoke. He said to Johnny, “Will you take a message?”

Johnny cocked his head, his eyes bright. “What message’s that?”

“A deal,” Geralt said. “Single combat. She wins—the road goes around. I win—the road goes through.”

I stared at him, and Johnny let out a low long whistle. “She’ll not like the idea of putting her own neck out.”

“Only way she can actually win anything, though,” Geralt said. “She can pull every man, woman, and child in Velen here and march them against the road. So what? Emhyr var Emreis will call up a single legion of Nilfgaardian infantry and wipe them all out in an afternoon, and then he’ll hand out the emptied land to his soldiers for a reward. If she kills me and every man of this crew, he’ll send another one, and hire another witcher if he has to, and if she kills them, he’ll do it again.”

Johnny was listening to him intently, his small head nodding a little. Geralt jerked a thumb towards me. “If she says yes, I’ll send Dandelion to make Emhyr commit. She can take the chance, and if she wins, he’ll send the road around, and that’ll be the end. Or she can hide, and keep hiding, until by the time he rams it through she’s dwindled down to something small and putrid that a passing witcher will take out in a night.”

Johnny scratched his head. “Seems to me you’d be wagering a wide amount on her cleaving to her bargain,” he offered.

His point seemed to me excellently made, but Geralt shrugged a little. “The Crones always keep their word, don’t they? I’ll keep mine.” 

And he held firm to his determination, even after Johnny returned the next day with the Crone’s agreement. Geralt went so far as to order Master Claussan to halt further construction until the matter was resolved, and despite my several attempts to persuade him to be wary of trusting a fiend as comprehensive as the ones he had described to me himself, he insisted on my riding straightaway to Oxenfurt to carry the bargain to Emhyr.

It was with no little anxiety that I entered the emperor’s office, having made an uncomfortable four days’ journey in the company of four members of the patrol. We had encountered no difficulty as we skirted the bog, a circumstance which filled me only with more trepidation, for I sensed the way had been deliberately left clear for us: and if the Crone’s influence and power extended so far, how much more danger would my dear friend face, when standing against her on her own ground? I could not help but hope, for his sake, that Emhyr might reject the proposed bargain out of hand, as offering too great a risk to one whose ultimate victory was assured. He had spilled the blood of thousands in his conquests: what was a little more, to him?

But the emperor listened to me without comment, and asked only the proposed date of the confrontation. I told him the day following directly upon my own return with his acquiescence to the terms. He sat in thoughtful silence a moment longer, and then said, “Tell the witcher I agree to his bargain. Should he fall to the Crone, the highway shall go around, and never again will I send men into the bog. You shall serve as witness to the combat.”

I rode back to tell Geralt the news with a sinking heart—that sank only further as my companions and I found a narrow but solid trail opened for us straight through the bog back to the work site. Even when I had given him the emperor’s words, I begged him to reconsider. But Geralt only shook his head briefly and went a little way into the bog, where meeting Johnny he told the little godling the news, and confirmed noon on the next day as the hour of the battle. He then returned to the camp and spent the rest of the afternoon in brewing his varied potions, and cleaning and preparing his equipment, his silver blade and his steel both, armor and crossbow. When the night fell, he did not go to his rest, but settled himself upon his knees before a low fire, and entered into that purifying vigil which refreshed him more profoundly than mere slumber. He remained in this attitude as still as a carven sculpture of a witcher until late in the next morning, when at last he rose and stretched easily, with no sign of discomfort after remaining so long in one position, and put on his armor and his weapons.

He took a horn from one of the patrolmen, to give us a signal that the battle was about to be joined. When he saw me making preparations to accompany him, he frowned and told me, “You don’t need to come. Johnny’ll tell you what happened.”

“No, my friend,” I said, resolutely. “If you choose to set your foot upon this perilous road, I will not forsake you, though my heart forbodes that you go to your death. But if you meet it by treachery, I shall make it known to the world, and call down retribution upon the foul creature’s head.”

“Dandelion, if she’s going to cheat, she’ll just kill you too,” Geralt pointed out, which was an excellent point, but I swallowed and said, “Also, the emperor told me to go and serve as a witness.”

Geralt sighed, but made no further demur. Together we walked into the foul bog, and as before found a trail opening itself for us. Fresh alarm stirred in my breast as we walked into the depths, for soon I began to see strange misshapen shadows stirring at our backs, and drawing closer after us, monstrous forms looming out of the greenish mirk, some of them towering high as ogres. “Geralt!” I whispered urgently, drawing his attention towards them, but he only shook his head and said briefly, “No way to go but through.”

We came to a low footbridge over a pockmarked stretch of hissing, bubbling ground, and I heard distantly a faint malicious cackling as we crossed its length. We made our way through a strange hollow collection of empty houses which bore to me the character of a theater set, a parody of the familiar, and Geralt halted at last in the large clearing between them, where on the other side of a large rotting tree stump I was dismayed to see a cage suspended from a tree branch, and within imprisoned our little godling friend, who clutched the bars and called out desperately, “Geralt, it’s a trap!”

That cackling now burst out afresh, and around the side of the false church came at last the Weavess, a being so monstrous that even my words can hardly suffice to convey her. Merely to describe her hideous appearance—the rotting eye that spawned flies and maggots with every turn of her head, the ghastly leathered hide that seemed to have been formed by layers of flayed human skin, the dismembered legs that dangled from her waist and the monstrous hunched curve of her body—cannot bring to you the stench of rotting meat which wafted before her, the grotesquely shuffling steps that counterfeited but did not truly resemble any human movement, nor the terrible crawling sensation that ran over my entire body as she drew near, sending its prickling fingers into my very brain.

“Well, white wolf,” she crooned in glee, as she sidled back and forth along a wide arc, studying us both avidly. “What a succulent delight you have brought with you. The perfect sweet with which to complete the feast.” I shuddered throughout all my being, and she shrieked again with that hideous laughter. “Indeed today you shall more than repay all your debts.”

She gestured to the side of the clearing, where with horror I saw two more monstrous shapes looming: not living creatures, but grotesque sculptures formed of branches bent and tied like baskets, the knots formed of long plaited strands of human hair, and filled entirely with the bloody dismembered limbs of rotting corpses, as though she meant to rebuild her two slain sisters out of human flesh. My gorge rose in my throat, and I jerked my eyes away from the horror as she hissed to Geralt, “Do not regret my sisters’ absence, witcher. You will see them soon again. The first draught of your blood will revive them, and together before your eyes we will dine upon your savory roasted flesh, one limb at a time, and then we shall open your entrails and slurp them up with your screams.”

I pressed my fist to my mouth, shaking with horror. The shadows around us had grown ever more numerous, and now at last they all began to emerge from the fog: drowners and ghouls and ogres in the dozens, a legion of the vile. “Thought you never broke your word,” Geralt said steadily, even now betraying not the slightest hint of fear or alarm.

The Weavess hissed, “We are true to those true to _us_ , witcher! Do you think I acknowledge a bond given to one who has spurned our service, turned traitor? Have you already forgotten that you came to our Sabbath, begged entrance to our revels under false colors, and there fell upon our guests? I need keep no word to _you_.”

“Figures you’d find some kind of excuse,” Geralt said, still no trace of any sentiment of fear in his voice, only the purest contempt. “You pretend to have some kind of code like you pretend to give back fair value for what you take. But you don’t. You’re nothing but an empty pit full of bones. You don’t want to help anyone or build anything. All you want to do is feed your hunger.”

She snarled, a sound that clawed at my senses, and said, “And today _you_ shall feed it, witcher.”

“Don’t think so,” Geralt said. “See, the thing is, I’d have kept the bargain. But you forgot something. You didn’t actually make a deal with _me_.” She had taken the first shambling steps towards us, but now she halted and frowned at him with a sudden stirring of wariness. Geralt nodded. “Yeah. You made a deal with the emperor of Nilfgaard. And Emhyr var Emreis doesn’t play fair any more than you do.”

As she stared at him across the clearing, Geralt lifted the horn from his belt and blew a long ringing blast upon it. He lowered it from his lips, and even as the echoes died away, another horn call came in answer, not distantly—a call that had become both familiar and dreadful to any man of courage in the Northern Realms in these last fifteen years, and which here and now fell upon my ears as the sound of angelic voices: a Nilfgaardian cavalry charge.

As she turned in shocked alarm, through the mist came the rolling thunder of the hooves of five hundred massed horses on the gallop, and as the riders emerged, they lowered as one a shining forest of pikes tipped not with steel but with silver, and they smashed into the gathered horde of monsters like a man swinging a scythe through a tall field of rye ready for the harvest.

As the Weavess shrieked in impotent horror and rage, Geralt took hold of my arm and shoved me back towards one of the buildings and ordered, “Get under cover!” as he drew out his silver blade. Ordinarily, I must have defied his command to join the battle against these fiends, but I understood he meant me to fulfill the orders of the man whose will had brought us here, and observe the final victory rather than partake of it directly. I accordingly ran at once to the nearest house, and hid just within the doorway to watch.

The glories of that battle I have since immortalized in song, and can scarcely do more justice; suffice to say that Geralt fought with all the vigor and skill of a master witcher at the heights of his craft, and with all the passion and fury of a man enraged by injustice and cruelty. Indeed, he did keep his own word, for when the Nilfgaardian soldiers had finished slaughtering the monsters and a company of them came to close in upon their hideous mistress, he waved them back and gave the Weavess the single combat she had tried to deny him. His silver blade flashed retribution and terror as he drove her back, weaving with blinding speed through her lashing attempts to rend his flesh, his face set in grim determination, and as she began to stumble he pursued her, until he had backed her up against the foul misshapen sculptures of her two sisters, and diving into a roll came up before her and planted a short silver knife directly into the heart of her body, while his silver sword sheared cleanly through her neck, and dropped her lifeless bulk at their feet.

He stood, breathing in deep draughts of air, and stretching forth his hand brought forth cleansing flames to scorch the three together, a hideous roasting smell rising from this pyre, and stepping back at last motioned to the soldiers to bring more firewood, more tinder, torn from the roofs and walls of the false village, to build the flames even higher.

#

“I can’t believe you didn’t _tell_ me,” I said afterwards, with some small degree of I thought justified reproach.

Geralt was stowing his saddlebags onto his patient mount, the as-ever unfortunately named Roach—I have _tried and tried_ to get him to use something else, if there is anything that can completely wreck any sense of imagery or poetic setting it is coming hard up on the word _Roach_ —as we made ready to depart for Oxenfurt. The highway had already forged a substantial distance past the previous day’s camp, for just behind the legion of soldiers, Emhyr had sent a legion of additional workmen, as though he had entertained not the least doubt of Geralt’s victory—as I suppose he hadn’t.

I frowned even as I considered the matter. “I don’t understand, though,” I said. “How _did_ you arrange it? Did you give a message to one of the soldiers who rode with me, or—”

“Didn’t arrange anything,” Geralt said, tightening the saddle cinch.

“What?”

“I don’t break my word, Dandelion. I made a deal and I stuck to it. I went out there alone to fight her alone. I didn’t ask Emhyr to do anything.”

I stared at him in enormous consternation. “But—but then how did you know that Emhyr had sent the soldiers?”

Geralt shrugged. “I didn’t. Not for sure.”

“Oh, like hell you didn’t,” I said flatly. I’d _seen_ him standing there, blowing that horn. He’d _known._

Geralt stopped, his hands on the saddle, without looking around at me. He stood motionless a moment and then said quietly, “Yeah. Guess I did.”

He pulled himself into the saddle without another word, and was silent nearly all the way to Oxenfurt. There the chamberlain sent us in at once, and we found the emperor away from his desk for once, standing by his wide window awaiting us, his hands clasped loosely behind his back. He turned as we entered, and his eyes rested upon Geralt with it seemed to me a peculiar intensity, beyond mere satisfaction in having his orders carried out. “Well?” he said.

Geralt halted in the middle of the room. “Road’s moving again,” he said laconically, reducing all the bloody labor of our toil to near triviality. But a marked tension had come into his body when we entered the room, as though he felt himself in the presence of—an enemy, or at least some vast serpentine danger, and his own gaze was fixed unwavering on Emhyr in a mirror of the emperor’s sharp focus. I rarely consider myself incidental under any circumstances, yet in this moment I sensed that I stood outside a confrontation of two titanic wills, who scarcely perceived my presence. “Thanks for the soldiers,” Geralt added, almost offhand. “Nice surprise.”

And though Emhyr had not been there, had seen nothing of the confrontation, he said softly, “You knew I would send them.”

Geralt made no answer. His hands were clenched at his sides. Emhyr regarded him a moment longer, then crossed the room towards him, halting with only an arm’s length between them. Their gazes remained locked. “Once again you have served me well, witcher,” Emhyr said. “And this time, you shall choose your reward.”

He turned slightly towards his desk. So wholly had my attention been occupied by them both that I had not even made note of the massive chest standing before it, the lid ajar just enough to permit me now to see it was filled brimful of Nilfgaardian gold florens, and on the desk a long and narrow case, closed. “You may take twenty times your promised fee in gold,” Emhyr said, a fortune on such a scale that I swallowed against a mouth gone dry, “or you may have the sword in that case.”

I could scarcely conceive of a blade so extraordinary as to be worth even near such a vast sum, and Geralt, too, darted a surprised look at the emperor’s face. Emhyr only indicated the case with a gesture, and after a moment, Geralt warily went to the desk and lifted the lid. I leaned over, and stared baffled. The blade within was certainly old enough to be legendary, but its years showed in pitted and stained metal, and an edge bitten badly in two places, and the hilt, unadorned with any jewels, was wrapped in disintegrating and blackened leather. It looked quite honestly as though a single good blow would snap it, and Geralt regarded it with as much confusion as I did, and then he lifted his head to look back at the emperor.

“This sword will not kill a single drowner nor cut the armor of the meanest bandit,” Emhyr said. “It slays only by the thousand. It is the sword of House Emreis.”

Geralt flinched as though he had been struck. I froze, myself, and very carefully drew back from the desk. The old, begrimed sword suddenly took on a terrifying cast. I darted a look of alarm at Geralt, who stood silent before the desk: he too knew what it meant to be asked to carry the emperor’s sword. Of course, what preoccupied me at the present was what it might mean to _refuse_ such an offer.

“Do you understand the significance?” Emhyr asked. Geralt jerked his head in a short, sharp nod. “Then choose. But know that either choice shall be final. Take the sword, and you shall carry it so long as we both live. Take the gold, and you shall go unfettered, with the assurance that never again will I call upon your services, regardless of the extremity.”

A gasp of relief would have escaped me, if I had permitted myself to make a sound. That was scarcely penalty at all: I knew Geralt had never liked royal clients to begin with, and he had just passed an entire year in Skellige to put himself beyond Emhyr’s reach. In any case, a fortune as vast as the one contained in the chest would set my friend safely beyond any need of work at all.

But when I glanced at Geralt’s face, he was staring back at the emperor with a stricken expression, as though he had been threatened with the headman’s axe instead of his own freedom. I wondered if he thought Emhyr was lying, and that some worse consequence would follow on refusing the emperor.

But Emhyr said in answer to his look, with sudden ferocity, “You know my purpose. I have given my own life to it. Am I to indulge you, as I have not indulged myself? _No_. If you would be free, to live out your days as a lone witcher traveling the wilderness unencumbered, then take the gold and depart. I have made do with lesser men all my life. I will manage. But I will not pursue you clamoring for your aid, and let you refuse me from time to time to make a pretense of your freedom. I have let you stand inside my heart. _Choose_.”

I knew not what to think, what to make of Emhyr’s words, when he spoke as though he offered a priceless gift instead of a burden and a chain—and then I knew still less, for Geralt shut his eyes and said in a raw and desperate voice, “The sword,” as though he could not bear to do otherwise.

He let out a deep breath as soon as the words had left him, as though the decision had lifted some weight from his shoulders; he opened his eyes and straightened. Emhyr also seemed to ease a little, to my surprise, as though he too had been filled with the same wound-tight tension. They gazed at one other again now as fixedly as before, but all watchfulness had gone; there was even to my astonishment a warmth in the emperor’s implacable look, and his voice had gone low and satisfied as a lover’s when he said to me, “You shall serve as witness, bard.”

I hardly knew what to do, or say; I could only stare helplessly as Emhyr stepped forward, and with both hands lifted the blade carefully and tenderly from its case before he turned to Geralt, and facing him clenched his hands down around the sword’s edge until the blood dripped freely.

Geralt was already stripping the gauntlets swiftly from his own hands, discarding them with careless haste to the floor. “From my hands, receive this blade, and bear with it the honor of my house,” Emhyr said softly. Before my appalled gaze, Geralt reached out unhesitating and took the sword into his own hands, and letting it bite deep mingled his own blood with the emperor’s along its length. “Give me your oath.”

Geralt did not speak a moment, frowning; I thought, hoped, that he’d thought better of this lunacy in the last possible moment. But he only sought for words, for lack of knowing the formal ritual, and abruptly he looked Emhyr squarely in the face and said simply, “I’m yours. I swear it.”

Emhyr drew a sudden sharp breath, his eyes glinting deep. He inclined his head once, and gestured to the case; Geralt laid the blade carefully down within. “Leave us,” Emhyr said aside to me, a flat dismissal, and after a desperate final look at Geralt—who never even _glanced_ at me—I stumbled to the door in blank helplessness, bereft of words for perhaps the first time ever in my life.

The chamberlain opened the door for me, and closed it again behind me. But before he could shut it, I turned one final time, struggling to bring forth one cry, one protest, that might undo what seemed to me a burst of sudden fevered madness. The chamberlain frowned at me, censorious, but I couldn’t have cared in the slightest. As the door swung closed between us, I had one last shocking glimpse into the room, as Emhyr left blood smeared vividly red over Geralt’s skin, taking his face into his hands to kiss him, while beneath Geralt’s eager, hungry grasp, long dark red stains grew like living vines down the emperor’s mantle.

#

I staggered from the palace almost unseeing, my head awhirl with confusion, and sought the only refuge I could think of: good, solid Zoltan, who promptly dosed my babbling and dismay with several glasses of cold dwarven spirits. But even this remedy could not fully calm me. “He _took the sword!_ ” I cried to him, when I could manage this much coherence. “He _kissed_ him!”

“Bloody _who?_ ” Zoltan roared at me.  

“ _Geralt!_ ” I shrilled back.

“I know _Geralt_ ; who’s he damned well kissing that’s got you in such a plather?” Zoltan demanded, and gave me the very scant pleasure of seeing my friend as shocked and baffled as I myself felt, when I told him.

“You’re _drunk_ ,” Zoltan informed me, with so much certainty that if only I had been _more_ so, I might almost have been able to believe him.

“I’m _not_ ,” I said, near despair. “I wish I _were_.” I suited action to words and snatched the bottle of spirits to pour myself another glass. “Zoltan, what do we _do?_ ”

Before Zoltan could assist me with any kind of plan for Geralt’s rescue, I had first to explain to him the truly horrifying scale of the situation our friend had gotten himself into. This was by no means abetted by Zoltan’s repeatedly interrupting me to say, in tones of utter disbelief, “Are ye _sure?_ ” and “That canna be how it _really_ happened,” and the like, and ultimately forcing me to go back to the very beginning of the entire misadventure and recount for him in full our meeting with the emperor, our journey along the highway from Vizima, and our labors in Crookback Bog, before finally returning to the fateful meeting I had just left.

Zoltan expressed his opinion that the narrative was also not abetted by my downing several more glasses of spirits as I talked, but I beg to differ: they were _necessary_.

When at last I had finished, he sat with a disturbed and concerned expression, in silence, and then said slowly, “Well, lad, I won’t deny it seems to me a tangled business, but if Geralt’s made his oath, I don’t see there’s anything to be done about it.”

“Don’t _say_ that,” I said miserably, and drank two more glasses in quick succession, or perhaps three; in any event, enough to deliver myself to the sweet relief of an oblivion that lasted until well into the following morning. I roused groggily in the back room with my feet dangling uncomfortably far over the edge of the cot where Zoltan had laid me down, hearing voices speaking out in the shop, and staggered up to emerge into the front, where I found Zoltan pouring a glass of ale for Geralt himself. For one brief glorious moment, I thought I had suffered some bizarre sort of dream or hallucination, perhaps brought on by swamp air, and then I noticed on Geralt’s back the _third_ sword hilt, strapped down between the other two, low enough so Geralt wouldn’t grab its hilt by accident.

“Hey, Dandelion,” Geralt greeted me, with all the usual signs and appurtenances of sanity, and even of happiness; if I hadn’t known better, I would have said he was in better spirits than I had seen him in some length of time.

His kind salutation could only be answered in one possible way. “Have you _lost your mind?_ ” I shrieked at him.

The next several hours were spent in our trying to persuade Geralt that there was no possible way he had willingly and in his right mind chosen to deliver himself to the service of Emhyr var Emreis, much less to his more carnal desires, and his trying to persuade us of the reverse. His task was not made the easier when an unguarded gesture of exasperation on his part, lifting his hands to drop them, shifted the bench beneath him, and made him grimace faintly as he adjusted his seat, as though he had surrendered even _this_ to Emhyr’s possession—an interpretation, I might add, that was only confirmed by his abashed and squirming reaction to our indignant stares, which he refused to meet.

 “Goddammit, Dandelion, you were _there!_ ” he yelled at me finally, growing impatient. “You _saw_ it. You’ve seen _all_ of it—Nilfgaard, the highway—You even heard him last time!”

“What are you even _talking_ about?” I said despairingly.

“The North!” Geralt said. “Don’t you get it? He’s not going to pillage the North to send a few buckets of gold back home. He never wanted to. He’s going to share Nilfgaard’s treasure with the North instead. He’s going to bring highways and running water and trade, he’s going to wipe out the monsters and the bandits, he’s going to build monuments and libraries and palaces in every city. He’s going to _make peace_. For _everyone_ , and for centuries to come. Maybe even longer.”

Zoltan and I both stared at him. Geralt glared back. Then Zoltan said, “Are you _in love with him_ , you daft bugger?” and Geralt _blushed_ , and I moaned faintly and buried my head in my arms.

“What the hell did you even think he did to make me?” Geralt muttered in scarlet resentment, as Zoltan dug out the bottle of spirits and grimly filled his and my glasses again. “He offered me fifty thousand florens to _go away_.”

Zoltan promptly sprayed his entire mouthful of spirits across the table. “ _Fifty thousand florens?”_ he howled. “For fuck’s sake, man! There’s other cocks in the yard! Think of your retirement!”

Geralt sighed, wiped a hand over his wet face, and got up. “I’m going back to the palace,” he informed us. “I’ll come by in a couple of days after you’ve gotten over it.”

“He’d better be laying you on a bed made of solid fucking gold, that’s all I’ve got to say,” Zoltan said, shaking his head in vast indignation.

“I’ll make the suggestion,” Geralt said dryly. “He wants to see you, by the way,” he added to me. “I’ll ask him to give you a few days for that, too.”

“Sweet Melitele, what the fuck _now_ ,” I said, putting my head back down on the table. “Hasn’t he tormented me _enough?_ ”

“He wants you to write something about the fall of the Crones, how the empire defeated them, that kind of thing,” Geralt said. “I think that’s why he sent you along in the first place, actually,” he added.

I raised my head to stare at him. “Oh, I’ll write _something_ all right,” I said vengefully. “Just you wait.”

# End


	2. The Emperor's Sword

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What happened after the door closed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With many thanks to yunitsa for the prompt!

His hands were throbbing where the sword had cut them, and he cared nothing. Geralt’s mouth was eager and yielding beneath his, as though with his oath given, all was given: a gift of such extraordinary magnitude and so unexpected that Emhyr might have wept, if he had not spent the last of his tears too long ago to find them again.

He had fought alone now for twenty years and more. He had gathered a host of able men, but they served him for a thousand lesser causes of their own: ambition or admiration or greed, pride or honor, the love of seeing their nation raised up; few had ever truly understood what he sought to do. Most did not wish to: in their eyes a bloody conqueror had more hope of success, and providing a vehicle for their own, than a man indulging what they saw as quixotic idealism, or paranoid fears. What Nilfgaardian could look upon the rough kingdoms of the North and see any real danger to their own peace? It was too far a distance for most men’s imagination to cross.

And then a mere witcher of all people, a solitary wanderer for hire, to turn and ask him _why_ —he had answered dismissively, at first. Only afterwards had Emhyr raised his head, and looked at the closed door between them frowning, as though someone had breathed upon a long-faded ember of hope and made it glow faintly back to life. Even then he had not allowed himself to kindle it to flame; he had only thought _Perhaps I will speak with him again_ , and given the orders, and thought nothing more of it until the next day, when Mererid had returned to tell him that the witcher had gone back into the wilds, leaving behind his companions and yet another fortune.

“Very well,” Emhyr had said after a moment, slowly. “When he is found, bring him to me at once.”

He had rationed the growth of his hope until days and weeks turned into months, and he finally allowed himself to become certain that the absence was _deliberate_ , that the witcher had seen the true shape of the work and had felt the _need_ to bury himself in the wilderness to hide from its brutal demands.

Even then Emhyr had not dared to hope for—for _this_ , Geralt choosing to lay his life upon the altar beside his own, a sacrifice lightened impossibly by being shared. He had only known, in a kind of savage desperation, that he could not bear to be tormented by the _chance_ of it.

He kissed Geralt again hungrily, careless of the taste of his own blood; he was leaving smears over Geralt’s skin, and in some part of his heart he was glad for them, the marks of ownership. Geralt’s arms were around him, strong as steel. “Your hands,” Geralt murmured, kissing him. His skin had a faint clinging taste of smoke and ash and his armor of the green rot of a swamp, an intoxicating reminder that Geralt had just come fresh from the battlefield in his service, victorious.

“It is nothing,” Emhyr said. “Take off this armor.”

They came together there upon the floor, Geralt’s urgency as violent as his own. “My sword, my blade,” Emhyr said softly, hungrily, against his mouth, palming wide strokes over the astonishing hardness of his lean body, the battery of scars.

“Yes,” Geralt gasped, a plea. “Yes,” his own hands grasping, asking, and Emhyr shuddered; he had never before wanted to take a man to his bed, much less imagined allowing a man to have him, and yet he felt shockingly that he could never again refuse Geralt anything, could not _wish_ to refuse him.

Geralt said, raw, “Me first, I can’t—” before he shuddered into silence, and Emhyr kissed him and found his way into Geralt’s body, drove into him, while Geralt groaned softly almost as though in pain and came to climax almost at once. “Oh, fuck, yes,” he said a little drunkenly, so relieved that Emhyr laughed, and in answer Geralt shivered beneath him, around him, already rousing again.  

“Come, then,” Emhyr murmured, and moved on him again, exerting all his will to hold off his own release until he had brought Geralt a second time. He afterwards yielded himself to Geralt’s still barely-leashed hunger with a satisfaction not only carnal but somehow virtuous: when Geralt at last sank panting upon his shoulder, his eyes closed, sated, Emhyr felt that he had—cared properly for his sword, perhaps, and he laughed softly to himself once more.

“Mm?” Geralt murmured, and laughed also, when Emhyr told him, and nuzzled a few more greedy kisses into his collarbone and along his throat. “It _is_ important to keep your blade honed and oiled…” he said blandly.

“A task I see will consume a great deal of my attention henceforth,” Emhyr said, with mock severity, and abruptly he was kindling with helpless lust again: he had not _laughed_ with anyone in—

Geralt sensed his rousing, and pushed himself up eagerly, leaning for his mouth again, but Emhyr caught him with fingers across his lips, stern. “ _I_ am not a witcher,” he said dryly, “nor a youth, and I have a perfectly comfortable bedchamber down the hallway. Mererid!” he called.

Geralt emitted a squawk of dismay and dived for a piece of his discarded armor. Emhyr glanced at his absurd effort to cover himself with some amusement, then told Mererid, “A dressing gown, and one for Geralt. And clear the rest of the day’s schedule. We will dine in my chambers.”

“Yes, Sire,” Mererid said, bowing, and withdrew to see it done.

“Were you under the impression I meant to conceal you?” Emhyr asked, pushing himself to his feet—with a slight groan. He would have a large couch installed in the room, perhaps. “I am sorry to inform you it will not escape the notice of any member of my court that you are now carrying my blade.”

“I’d still like to keep _some_ bits concealed,” Geralt said, in tones of reproach. “At least from your _chamberlain_.”

He stood up still holding the breastplate before himself and glared when Emhyr made no effort to conceal his amusement: as insolent as ever, gloriously. Emhyr stepped closer to him, and cupped his face between his hands, and kissed him again softly, letting himself feel again all the wonder of it, that this infernally proud spirit should be _his_ now, should have willingly laid himself into Emhyr’s hands, asking only to be put to use.

“My own,” he murmured softly, his hand curled around the sweetly damp back of Geralt’s neck, as though holding a hilt. “I will wield you well, I swear it,” and saying it was fiercely glad, suddenly, that Geralt had only come to him now, when the wars were already over: Geralt would have fought for him, would have slain honest soldiers fighting for other men, but it would have scarred his own heart to do such work. There would be no need for it now. “You shall cut down the shadows that lie on the world, and kindle the first fires in the darkness, to make a light for my hands to work.”

Geralt shuddered violently and seized him, the breastplate tumbling away forgotten, and carried him to the floor once more with kisses; he did not interrupt when Mererid opened the door, either. Emhyr found he could not regret it in the least.

# End

**Author's Note:**

> With many thanks to lim for beta! All feedback loved! If you like, [reblog](https://astolat.tumblr.com/post/156093823108/incomplete-24354-words-by-astolat-chapters-11)!


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